N.O., THANKS. Apologies for the protracted absence. I was in New Orleans for a long weekend. This was my first visit, and I was tied to a group (long story) so I was mostly tied to the French Quarter and couldn't perform the further-ranging enquiries that I trust I'll get to on another visit, but I will share some short impressions:

- New York has always liked to tear down and renovate, but lately this tendency has become a mania; where once we more or less inadvertently toppled monuments to vanished ways of life, now our civic bulldozers are ever revved and eager to erase anything predating the Giuliani era. So it was nice to be someplace where aged, crumbling edifices are routinely replastered and reopened for business -- including the Cemetaries, where tombs are regularly cracked into, stuffed with new roommates for the dead, and imperfectly sealed up. The crud, the fallen bits of plaster, the sagging balconies, the irregularly hanging French doors, are beautiful in the same way that the smell of rotting flowers is beautiful: more vivid for their decomposition.

- Given that, it is easy to see why voodoo remains a vital part of the City's image and folklore. If communication with the dead is important, you won't take lightly any decision to erase vestiges of their earthly existence. (One practitioner's shop I visited displayed two official mayoral commendations.) I took the time to listen to one initiate -- fat, bland, and cane-bearing -- lecture on his craft. He downplayed the "fear factor" and Hollywood misrepresentations of voodoo, but his stories were purposefully spooky, full of zombies and reversed fortunes. He was very calm and businesslike, and gave his spiel at a rapid clip so as to keep the queue of auditors moving, but his eyes remained brightly alert throughout the performace, as if to remind guests that he was powerful and not above availing his powers then and there if he had to. He reminded me of a middle-class black woman I'd interviewed years earlier, who had erected a row of African ceremonial masks on the facade of her building on the south side of West 49th Street, facing Worldwide Plaza. These were meant, she had told me, to inhibit developers. That the condo part of the Plaza has never been very successful, and the theatre there briefly closed, I would never attribute to her totems, but as they say in the old Jewish jokes, it couldn't have hurt.

- I should have hated Bourbon Street for being so fucking cheesy, but I loved it anyway. First of all, they sell Everclear; y'can't get that back home. Also, any institution that gives work to hundreds of musicians, who play nearly round the clock, is okay by me (and has me checking the real estate classified in the Times-Picayune). But finally, Bourbon Street's spirit of license is indiscriminate and all-embracing. You don't have to be an initiate or a hipster or a pretty person of any sort to get in on it; fat suburbanites waddling unsteadily, plastic cup in hand, toward Hustler Hollywood are as welcome to it as future Trent Reznors. Even a cynical visitor from New York is forced to accept that all that stuff about the good times rolling -- as opposed to being ceremonially placed into the hands of those fashionable few whom local free papers deem worthy -- is sincerely meant. Bourbon Street takes all comers, and only very bad behavior gets you thrown out. Despite the puke-scented evidence, I think this is a good definition of heaven.

AND BESIDES, ORSON WELLES WAS FAT. This item about Michael Medved's recent on-air embarrassment reminded me that I hadn't heard much from the Flanders of Filmdom of late, so I visited his website. While Hollywood-Hatin' remains his hook, Medved seems to have branched out into mixed-use wingnuttery, and his site's collection of MM reviews is paltry and out of date.

Nonetheless it does contain the one review which I believe will represent Medved's peculiar approach to film criticism unto history: "Kangaroo Jack Hijacked to Partisan Agenda?"

Medved says he has no artistic problem with this film -- or, rather, the film ordinary mortals would see on actual screens -- but says it presents a "moral dilemma for conscientious filmgoers" because its story was written by Stephen Bing, "notorious even by the undemanding standards of Hollyweird" for not only behaving beastly to Elizabeth Hurley, but also contributing money to the Democratic Party. Is proof that Kangaroo Jack is no-goodski, despite superficial evidence of viewing experience!

Medved does recognize that "some sharp-eyed reader might assault your reviewer for inconsistency" because he had previously praised The Pianist, a film by a sex-crime fugitive. His explanation is marvelously instructive:

First, Polanski's well-publicized personal problems occurred decades ago, while Stephen Bing's made news merely months ago. Second, Polanski presently pursues no prominent political agenda, while Bing continues to devote much of his life's energy to bashing Bush and all other Republicans. And third, and most importantly, "The Pianist" counts as a serious, substantive, artful -- if flawed -- directorial tour-de-force about World War II suffering, while "Kangaroo Jack" amounts to mildly pleasing piffle about nothing in particular.

Bing demanded DNA testing to see if his girlfriend's baby was actually his; Polanski is accused of the statutory rape of a 13-year-old. But Polanski's is the lesser offense because it happened a big long time ago and because he doesn't wear any buttons with which Medved disagrees. (Doubtless, if Polanski denounces Bush at some future date, Medved will find that The Pianist has suddenly become double-plus-ungood.)

Not to be overlooked is Medved's third point, which suggests a lawyerly approach to the condemnation of films on political-parentage grounds: The Pianist is a good boy, your honor, with a record of service to its community. But Kangaroo Jack is a ne'er-do-well, a jackanapes! So please let the kid-fucker's movie go with a warning, but punish the Democrat's movie severely, and show our constituents that we're tough on thought-crime.

Medved gets bonus points for providing this classic bit of culture-warrior idiocy:

In Spielberg's case, the messages of "Saving Private Ryan" count as so patriotic, even heroic, that you can easily overlook the director's long-standing friendships with Clinton and Gore.

Now, by God, that's entertainment!

CUTTING TO THE CHASE. Here is a new piece by Jonah Goldberg called "What Is a Conservative?" It's crap. Here is the highlight:

I’m not calling the opponents on the right or left Stalinists or Nazis when I say they are totalitarians...

It's all like that. Save yourself the headache.

COP CROCK. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional:

When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn't it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?

There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.

Bullshit. The nets show us a bad-cop story only once in a very great while: only the most incontrovertible egregiously bad bluecoat behavior (nightstick-sodomizing, outright murder of citizens, etc) qualifies. (Even Malkin doesn't dispute that the stories she protests are true.) And that's it. Simple brutality charges, an everyday thing in this City and perhaps yours, don't make the cut. The presumption of truth is always with the police; generally, only when film footage inescapably overturns this prejudice do the news outlets give the civilians complainants a little airtime.

And these very brief glimpses into the shadows of law enforcement are completely overriden by the fictional portrayal of cops in the "mainstream media," which borders on deification. Cop shows from the Law & Order franchise to the CSI franchise, and everywhere in between, uniformly portray the boys in blue as paragons of honesty who cut far fewer corners to make a murder case than the average salesman would cut to close a deal. Indeed, cops are portrayed as morally superior to just about all non-uniformed citizens: watch a station-centered cop show like NYPD Blue and compare the skels, victims, and lawyers who drift in and out with the police -- you see a world gone terminally venal, in which only cops can be trusted (which is presumably why they seem only to fuck their colleagues).

The success of the ridiculous CSI shows I attribute to their reassuring underlying theme: that cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)

I don't begrudge the police this heroic treatment -- though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: We kicked their asses in the last election, all my pals make fun of them, and yet they persist with their accursed bumperstickers! Ooh, I will parse them, parse them good, the goddamn godless... don't get the wrong idea about me, I'm a tolerant guy... come on out, you atheist whore, so I can spit blessings in your face... here's my videogame! Bye!

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS. I'm getting a little tired of Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point was a neat little book, taken in the narrow context of marketing analysis, but his book-reading for the New Yorker mostly demonstrates how limited his POV is when applied to just about anything else.

For example, last year he suggested -- using a psych paper about successful survivors of child abuse, The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, and other such data -- that trauma isn't really that big a deal, that in most cases "our psychological immune system[s] will kick in and take away the sting of adversity." On its face this seems an unremarkably homey finding, but Gladwell made so much of our ability to soldier on in the face of horrors that a careful reader would eventually wonder why he thought it worth writing about. The answer, of course, is that in our pyschological age we talk so much about trauma and its effects that a fellow who comes around and says, look, it's not as bad as all that -- especially if he uses scholarly and literary sources -- seems to be bucking some sort of tide. When faced with the overwhelming task of processing and sorting out all the various categories of human suffering that our very advanced information-gathering has revealed to us, it may be soothing to hear an intellectual version of Quitcher Bitchin'.

Now Gladwell works his happy-chappy contrarian angle on the subject of our under-edumacated children. Taking off from Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good for You, he says that the kids' preference for video games and TV over book-learning is OK, because pop culture exercises a certain set of intellectual muscles which, though they are different from the muscles exercised by the study of American History and other such old-timey disciplines, are valid and worth strengthening. "Being 'smart' involves facility in both kinds of thinking -- the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning," Gladwell says, and while he admits that the latter sort of learning might at present be somewhat neglected, he is much more concerned with our inability to see the riches that the former kind might yield.

What Gladwell fails to mention is what specifically is gained by video-game learning, and what is lost in the neglect of what he calls "explicit" learning -- which category of knowledge he somewhat unfairly attaches to the Gradgrindian more-school-less-recess mandates of some modern educational policies. He seems to think that gaming and TV-watching provide some sort of information-absorption and problem-solving skills:

To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace -- by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot...

...[In gaming] players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests...

For what sort of future does this training fit young minds? Perhaps the jobs of CEO and General; but, and I hate to break it to parents, very few of our children are going to get those jobs. In general, the training gleaned from gaming and watching TV shows prepares most of us for more gaming and more watching of TV shows. In this regard we may say our children are well-, perhaps over-educated.

Though I cannot speak to the aesthetics of Doom and Grand Theft Auto, I will say that, much as I love The Sopranos, complicated plotting is the least of its excellencies; and that, while the ability to follow multiple story lines may be admirable and perhaps useful, it would better suit a young person to learn how to tie various story threads into an analysis, a skill that far predates the digital video disc.

It has been my experience as a remedial English tutor that even the brightest students are undertrained in, and often unaware of, the simplest analytic tools -- including grammar, sentence structure, and outlining. These are not nearly so easy to absorb as the skills Gladwell values, but the fact that he can make himself clear in essay form shows that he has himself mastered them, which makes it rather disturbing to me that he seems not to care much that we make so little effort to wrench our kids away from their entertainment modules long enough to learn how to diagram a sentence or tie three supporting details to a main idea.

We are all futurists nowadays, and it is to be expected that the author of The Tipping Point would hope to find some bright, positive New Paradigm in the video obsessions of our young people. But it is a stubborn fact that some sorts of machinery, greasy and earth-bound as they may seem, are yet necessary to our progress, and that this goes for intellectual as well as physical realities. If we don't teach our young citizens to think rather than merely process information, all the video-savvy in the world isn't going to save their sorry asses. As seductive as the Information Age fantasy is, we will never be a nation of managers, magically summoning prosperity with our Blackberrys, without something to manage. Something has to be created first. And to create we need tools. Noun-verb agreement is to my mind a good start. You can do your part by collaring some young ruffian and making him or her learn it.

A BRIEF BUT, AS ALWAYS, AMUSING STROLL AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE: "If you're like me you see the beatified Che Guevara as a mirage in the desert that is the fashionable Left's conception of human nature." -- Jeremy of Who Knew?

That's really very funny on several levels, but it should be mentioned that there is no "fashionable Left." The new thing is to care passionately, and be right-wing, and to call every Lebanese woman in your camera "babe." (Did you know that the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term?)

If this gruel is too thin for you, you might go a few degrees further right to Redstate.org, where we learn that man-on-boy action isn't so very bad when performed by a Republican like Spokane mayor Jim West:

Moreover, if, as his legislative record indicates, West is worried about teens having consensual sex with each other, and gays having access to youth at work, it could be seen as skating too close to the edge of hypocrisy that he was seeking out a supposed teen (admittedly, one who clained he was turning adult, or 18, in March) in a gay online forum, and offering inducements including an internship.

"Could be seen as skating too close to the edge of hypocrisy"! A very tolerant attitude, I must say. Of course, this toleration vanishes in comments, as the topic turns to homosexuals who are not Republican officeholders ("Replace 'homosexual' with 'incestuous' or 'pederast.' Now, should we 'tolerate' incest and pederasty?" "Look, I don't 'hate' homosexuals - I think a much better job should be done of educating people to the dangers of homosexuality" etc).

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

UPDATE. Jeremy asks in comments, what's so funny? Respectfully submitted, respectfully answered:

1.) Any sentence that begins "If you're like me," and is neither ironically meant nor testimonial advertising copy, is prima facie hilarious.

2.) Che Guevara = a mirage in the desert? I guess that means we liberals are crackbrained sufferers from heat stroke, running blindly and desperately toward Che Guevara, who looks to us like Paul Wellstone holding a bottle of cold, cruelty-free soy milk, only to trip over our Birkenstocks in the sand, while Jeremy and his whatever-they-ares are driving alongside us in air-conditioned Hummers, drinking out of Evian bottles and pointing and laughing.

3.) The fashionable Left! "Omigod! Is that the new Nicole Miller hacky-sack?" Besides, I heard we were all Out of Touch with America, which is not fashionable at all.

4.) Better yet, the fashionable Left's conception of human nature! Here Jeremy has us to the life. We stand in a large, white space, striking fashionably thoughtful poses, and after a suitably Pinteresque pause (Pinter hates America, like us; that's why we use his pauses instead of, say, Neil Simon's) one fellow-traveler (a person of color! Can't forget the diversity) announces, "Human nature -- isn't there some way we can tax it?" And the rest of us go "Word to your Mom" and nod in that really annoying way.

I could go on but I may be overthinking this just a bit.

MORAL RELATIVISTS. You want to know how they do it? Here's a good example. A Wall Street Journal writer looks at some confusion over CDC figures concerning obesity and mortality. His conclusion: no one really knows if being fat is bad for you. In fact, no one really knows much of anything -- not when it comes to the dark arts of medicine and climatology:

This is confusing--and that's the point. Science, of its nature, is always confusing. Medicine is uncertain. But public-policy formation in the U.S., especially as concerns health policy or the environment, whether obesity or the melting of the polar ice caps, admits to very little confusion. We claim to know. But in fact we usually don't know.

Contrast the approach of this WSJ guy, Daniel Henninger, with a different sort of assessment of the same basic data: Thomas Maguire takes the few extra steps needed to reveal that the statistical blips do not prove that packing on the pounds is a risk-free activity. The rest of us may come to similar conclusions using what our ancestors called common sense, paired with our powers of observation.

But for conservative functionaries such as Henninger, doing his bit to further the antiEnlightenment, the grey areas of scientific enquiry are proof that science is, after all, just guesswork, no more valid than your guesses or mine if it comes to that, so that the science community's consensus on, say, global warming can be easily ignored if your spritual or political leaders require it of you.

This attitude has long been in effect further down the food chain, of course -- as in this Washington Times laugher, in which evolution is referred to by its old name of Darwinism -- not an institution, after all, but just the ditherings of one guy who was not Jesus! If some folk prefer to "use a little imagination" on behalf of Intelligent Design, who are the labcoats to squawk? But now that the prestigious Journal has taken it up, we may note a change in the weather, so to speak. You're either with them or against them, as always, whether they're right or wrong -- but now, even if you know what you're talking about and they don't have the slightest fucking clue, "against them" is still the wrong place to be -- maybe even more wrong than ever.

SELECTED SHORTS. Saw a few movies:

The Red Violin. This Girard is an odd duck. If I hadn't seen Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould I would have expected something like Diva. Well, while The Red Violin is episodic, it's also got a big old McGuffin to pull you through: artistic inspiration as a barrier-breaking, life-changing motive-force. Plenty of other movies have worked this side of the street -- Lust for Life, Quills, Dr. Zhivago, etc. But using the violin and its sad backstory instead of a single artist-hero makes the trick a little dicier. It's easier to identify with the madness of Kirk Douglas than to imagine oneself risking the wrath of Maoist thugs for the music of John Corigliano. But I was impressed by the clever and highly specific takes on historical eras, especially the opium-addled British Romantics. And I wonder why Sam Jackson doesn't do more roles like this where he can, you know, act. Because he's very good at it.

Wag The Dog. Speaking as a jaded roue myself, I admired the unshakable cynicism, which has given the film life past its heyday as a Clinton joke. I didn't like DeNiro's performance. I'm sick of seeing him tuck the corners of his mouth, especially since watching him do it in that wretched Scorsese ad for American Express; it's become his personal Del Sarte schtick for "I don't know how to handle this emotion, folks." Wasn't Ron Silver available? Dustin Hoffman is more the thing. There's a man comfortable with his solipsism! Props also to Woody Harrelson, who made me think of Thurber's "The Greatest Man in the World."

Hotel Rwanda. The best thing about it is: no arc. Shit just keeps coming, and Don Cheadle just keeps putting on his nice clothes and taking care of increasingly precarious business. The scenes of horror are suitably appalling, but cleverly titrated so that you don't grow too numb to take them in. The madness seems as if it will never stop, and every un-mad moment is only carved out of it by the righteous will and cunning you have seen expended. By the end, even the money-shot restoration of (some of) Rusesabagina's extended family can't deceive you into thinking that the story is really over -- it merely pauses, in medium-long shot, to acknowledge a moment of grace before the film runs out. It's no shock that Terry George also wrote the relentlessly grim The Boxer, but it is a surprise -- a pleasant one -- that he was again given such a big canvas for so muddy-bleak a vision.

HALFWIT. A New Republic article cites a Dominionist nut as an example of what American People of Faith are thinking. Hugh Hewitt blows his stack: "It would be as if I made a claim that the Democratic Party believed 'x' because Michael Moore and the Greenpeace Board of Directors said 'x,'" huffs Hewitt.

Actually, Hewitt has claimed, repeatedly, that Michael Moore represents the Democratic Party, even without the "Greenpeace Board of Directors." Here's Hewitt at the 2004 Democratic Convention:

The podium speakers are acting the part of Penelope in the Odyssey — unraveling all that has been woven by the delegates during the day, or in this case, by Michael Moore during the day. It is a hard-Left group of delegates, and Moore's their crown prince even if Kerry's king for a day...

Throughout that Convention, of course, Hewitt made a mantra of referring to the Dems as "the Kerry-Moore Democrats."

I guess when you're working for Jesus, you don't even have to fact-check your own ass.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. It's so much nicer to talk about cancer than about gay people.

NO COMMENT. "That particular girlfriend loved Prince, which was my first clue this wouldn’t last and would end hard." -- James Lileks.

PROGRAM NOTES. I forced myself into the template and, instead of setting the whole works on fire and hopping up and down, naked and screaming, as a sane man would, I added some links. I don't know what kept me from putting Tbogg and Fafblog up there before; sloth, perhaps, or jealousy. Dum Luk's, author Martin Langeland's new showroom of high-definition language, is added as a rebuke to us all.

Atrios I'm leaving off. Not out of pique. It just seems ridiculous, like saying, "You know who you should listen to? The Beatles," at a party.

WHEN NERDS ATTACK! The previously-noted Kulturkampfer rage at George Lucas for not admitting Yoda is really Alan Greenspan has been relayed to major wingnut disseminators. Clearly their Right-sabres are all bent out of shape.

All I can say is, anyone who couldn't see what Lucas was up to from the very first appearance of Imperial Storm Troopers should be embarrassed to admit it, not loudly bewailing his fanboy betrayal.

UPDATE. If that's not enough KultKampf action for you, at OpinionJournal Harry Stein explains at great length that Jon Stewart isn't really funny.

I don't understand their need to deny the artistic abilities of people they don't agree with. I mean, I thought it was kinda funny when Bush jerked off that horse, and I'm not afraid to say so.

UPDATE II. Speaking of jerk-offs, at The Corner they explain that they're no prudes -- quite wild actually! They make jokes about Star Trek! -- but Laura Bush went too far -- though she may deserve a pass based on the agricultural nature of her blue material ("Farm humor isn’t about sex, it’s about life") -- the Bush Twins went too far, The Flintstones was a total ripoff of The Honeymooners, etc.

If they did go totally mad, how would we tell?

LICENSE TO SHILL. Just in case you were wondering how the Culture War's higher-ed front was going, Roger Kimball provides an update:

The old Marxist strategy of “increasing the contradictions”—a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are—is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelette without breaking eggs.

As with anything to which the word “Marxist” applies, there are at least eighty-seven things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated “contradiction” to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise.

Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill blah blah blah blah...

Then he goes on for hundreds of incendiary words about how bad liberal professors are, and ends by threatening their tenure ("An arrangement that was intended to protect academic freedom and intellectual diversity has mutated into a means of enforcing conformity and excluding the heterodox").

In other words, after a long explanation of the bad Marxist way of getting things done, Kimball pretty much tries the same thing himself. Evidently he means what he says about a "license for thuggery," but also believes that he possesses such a license. I wonder where he imagines he got it from?

SHORTER JANE GALT: Not only are Hollywood actors liberal and wrong -- they don't even know how to act! Jane Galt must school them in empathy!

(Refresh my memory, folks: back when libertarians actually existed, what were their distinguishing characteristics?)

BED-WETTERS AT CAMP KULTERKAMPF. How goes the Culture War? Bit of a snag at Libertas ("a forum for conservative thought in film"). The author has found an interview where Geoge Lucas mentions Fahrenheit 911 without spitting.

"Wired put Lucas on its cover, his face half-encased in the helmet Darth Vader," says the disappointed fanboy. "That may be more appropriate than they imagined."

His fellow Jedi rush in waving their light-sabres. "I still believe that despite Lucas’ own personal philosophy, his films belie a deep rooted conservatism," says one. "Perhaps Lucas doesn’t realize it," insists another, "but he is subversively conservative and even pro-life when he depicts this cold Cloning facility with a million babies in jars."

Yeah. And if Princess Leia ever got to know you, she'd really, really like you.

UPDATE. The Libertas post has received more comments; so far this one is my favorite. In case they've taken it down, here's the complete text:

As though there needed to be a subset of the “Star Wars Loser Group” now we have, whiney conserva-geek-star-wars-losers. What’s more, they’re looking [for] depth in a Star Wars movie. Depth! Meaning. Important political statements!

Time to turn off the computer, get out of the basement, move out of mom’s house and get a life.

Whoa -- looks like someone's gonna get a purple nurple.

Q.E.D. "I know Andrew [Sullivan] has a tendency to believe his own personal political preferences should and must be in perfect accord with external reality, but I’ve never subscribed to such a view." -- Jonah Goldberg.

The qualifier "external" suggests there is an internal reality by which one might make sense of Goldberg's politics. It probably resembles Porky in Wackyland.

DEATH OF A DREAM. I took a stroll by the former Plaza Hotel this fine Spring afternoon. In its day, the Plaza was a monument to all that was splendid in the Big Apple – the gold standard of hospitality, the home of Eloise, the monogrammed bathrobe at the end of the rainbow for countless mid-level managers.

But that Plaza is gone. In its place stands a cruel mockery: Its windows, as high as rocks can reach, have been brutally shattered, and rough workmen’s planks obscure their once-majestic views. The fabled doors, once guarded by proud men in splendid uniforms, now swing loose on their hinges, freely admitting squatters and prostitutes -- not the new Plaza’s guests, but its masters. Its white façade has been pitted by gunfire and scarred by graffiti; the scrawled legend BROKEN PROMISES looms over a family of three huddled against the north wall, sharing a makeshift supper.

The Oak Bar, in former days redolent of expensive cologne and fine wines, today reeks of crack cocaine. A visitor to the capacious bathrooms receives, instead of a gentle whisking of the shoulders and a posture suggesting that a tip would be appreciated, blows to the head and a rough frisking.

"This our house now," says "Crick," a self-styled "Customer Service representative" who patrols the lobby, a baseball bat in his right hand and a Blunt perched insouciantly between his teeth. "You got any problems, you fill out a card an’ give it to the desk clerk."

The effects of the Plaza’s decline reach far beyond its own walls. High life has drained from Fifth Avenue. Brooks Brothers is now a Dress Barn. Elizabeth Arden is a nail salon. Only the NBA store thrives. This famed thoroughfare, where splendid Easter bonnets were so recently displayed, is deserted after nightfall. "Since the Plaza moved to mixed-used, Fifth Avenue is a no-go zone," admits a weary-looking Sgt. William Daniels of the NYPD. "We only come in at dawn to carry out the dead."

"This is a wake-up call to our fellow citizens," declares Business Improvement District President Charles F. Gordon from behind the sandbag barricades of what was once F.A.O. Schwartz. "It’s too late for the Plaza, but for Christ's sake, keep the Helmsley open. Because if they get the Helmsley, it’s just a short hop to the Oyster Bar, and then God help New York!"

WISHFUL NON-THINKING. Lot of death-knells for newspapers lately, and what they have in common -- from the Ole Perfesser's smug solipsism("...it does seem as if we're undergoing a major change. I know that I pay less and less attention to newspapers and television...") to Richard Brookhiser's L'Envoi -- is that they're ridiculously premature. U.S. newspaper circulation, as even hostile reports admit, is down maybe about a point -- which means our papers are outperforming the national economy. Hey, maybe America's finished, too!

Certainly this is not a good time to grow rich in journalism, but -- this may shock the libertarians; cover their ears -- often getting rich is not the point. Sometimes the incentive is power. For decades certain gazillionaires (cough Murdoch cough) have been operating their tabs at a deficit just to keep their journalistic hobby-horses alive. 'Twas ever thus. You think James Callender got published on the strength of any fan-base besides Thomas Jefferson?

So why the declarations of irrelevance? Simple. These guys are pushing something called blogging. In this blog thing, some very few make money on ads, but mostly the practice is meant to burnish reputations sufficiently to get the reputees gigs with Media Matters, right-wing radio, or some other venue in a for-profit branch of the Fourth Estate. Some idiots, like myself, do it with only mild recompense from confused Blogad shoppers who perhaps picked a handful of sites from top of an alphabetical list, and some bloggers get nothing from it but the satisfaction of knowing that unseen dozens of bored office workers now know what the blogger had for dinner last night, what sort of stool the dinner engendered, and the blogger's thoughts on Faulkner and the Law of the Sea.

Sounds like quite a revenue stream, eh? Well, maybe, just maybe, if they can get everyone to believe that the Paper is dead, there'll be a reverse Tinker Bell effect. Then those few Americans who still know how to read will come running to Powerlineblog, jettisoning sports, weather, local news, and any other service Powerlineblog cannot deliver, just to be on trend!

It obviously works in politics, their reasoning seems to be; and since everything is politics, why should it not work for me?

GRAB BAG. The new Jonah Goldberg column is chock-full of idiocies, and I am very short of time. So I'll grab one of the idiocies, and you guys do what you will with the rest.

In the world we live in today, to be an American conservative requires two complementary forms of argumentation: skepticism about the new and faith in the old. You must have both to be a conservative of any stripe. Which new things you’re skeptical about and which old things you revere distinguish the kind of conservative you are. I think, unlike many readers, that by this criteria alone Sullivan is a conservative.

I revere our democracy and am skeptical of the government con men to whom it has been entrusted. I revere Social Security and am skeptical of the government con men etc. I revere our national resources etc.

Obviously I am a conservative. Goldberg's wrong about Sullivan, though, who is conservative -- as everyone possessing the bullshit-penetrating x-ray glasses known to my people as "common sense" knows -- only because the gravy train marked "Gay Conservative" still had empty seats when he turned up at the station.

Over to you.

SHOWING THE LOVE. Next to a drawing of him in which his narcotized-psycho features are scrunched into something resembling a smile, John Bolton is rhapsodized by the Crazy Jesus Lady:

It has long been said that in Washington a friend is someone who will stab you in the front. Mr. Bolton, again if the charges are true, has been a friend to many. He tells people off to their faces. That's refreshing. As a human tic, if that's what it is, it is probably more individually controllable than the temptation to damage people behind their backs, which is what people in intense environments more commonly and destructively do.

Really, Peggy? You really mean that?

Then here's some Bolton-style friendship, you brain-damaged old harpy. There was a time when your flights of flackery were so diabolical that we often had to step back out of sheer awe at your evil. But this here's some feeble shit. Where'd you get this he-shows-his-love-by-screaming-and-throwing-things strategy -- your marriage counsellor?

I don't care how many unwashed Gipper-touched-me-there spots you've collected, you've clearly been out there in the ether so long you don't even know what solid ground feels like. No wonder you had to go freelancing your propaganda skils during the last Bush campaign -- the White House guard-shacks are probably wallpapered with your mug shot. You're only fit to feed wingnut theo-fantasies in the Journal and play Prop Female at think-tank events.

Now way be my government appointment? Clearly I have the required temperment!

BIBLE BEATINGS. Norbizness offers not only a wicked cool Ween reference (now do one called IT REALLY HURTS MOMMY/STINKY VASELINE) but also an introduction to the National Council on Bible Cirriculum in Public Schools (tagline: "It's Coming Back..." which I think was also the tagline of one of the Alien movies).

To be fair, the Bible folk have both good and bad reasons to throw the Good Book at pre-teens. Among the bad:

Proponents say the course would utilize the Bible as a textbook to study history, literature and geography. Opponents argue the class, to be taught by a local minister’s wife, would indoctrinate students to Christianity.

Anyone who has lived among human beings (paper cut-outs of human beings don't count) for any length of time knows how this one works out. The minister's wife starts out in her demure, white Secular Humanist labcoat, merely using the Bible to help kids find Magog on a map, but before you can say "Funny, I don't feel tardy" she's stripped down to her Jesus-string and the kids are storming through the halls and pulling down the lanterne for godless biology teachers.

But I can get behind the Bible as Literature dodge -- mainly because, while this obviously is a dodge to these folks, it is also true that the Bible is literature, and vitally important literature at that. And we may see from this course the results that human experience leads us to expect: the weak-minded indoctrinated, the lazy confused, and the inquiring (especially if they are blessed with teachers who are not down with the zombies-for-Christ program) inspired to learn that the Good Book is not just something with which Granny consoles herself and upon which politicians place their hands when they lie, but a book with dizzyingly rich literary, religious, and political contexts -- which knowledge may make the world more interesting to them, and -- Hallelujah! -- lead some out of the stultifying swamp of ignorance (and religious bigotry) entirely.

Always bet on knowledge over ignorance, kids. It may not pay off very many times, but when it does hit the winnings are exceedingly large.

Of course, the law of unintended consequences cuts both ways. Since "important part of our culture" is a big hunk of the Bible justification, after a few frivolous lawsuits Cultural Relevance will become the standard by which Mr. Hand will be forced to accept papers about The Relationship Between Pulp Fiction and The Clinton Impeachment. Plus the poetry might inspire rhymes like this:

I'm black but comely, my bed is green
I use the myrrh and not the Afro-Sheen

Which would just be terrible.

PAGE SIXTH CIRCLE OF HELL. Boy, this gossip columnist really lets Katie Couric have it:

Andrew Lack, former president of NBC, described Katie, during the good times, as a "fist in the velvet glove," while for years her staff has called her "Katie Dearest." Bryant Gumbel... once complained, "I've had one assistant for 18 years. Somebody who shall remain nameless went through five in five years..."

...the stress of crashing ratings has obviously made her inner Cruella de Vil — always there under the surface — emerge full-time...

Each morning she is now expertly and heavily made up — not exactly the look most harried working moms can emulate. And while doing interviews, her bare legs in stiletto mules are perpetually center stage, getting more attention from the camera than the guest she is supposed to be interviewing...

Mee-yow! But wait'll you hear this, girls:

But what I think has contributed to Katie's major loss of appeal is that millions of women have finally caught onto the liberal bias in much of her reporting.

Wha? Huh wha? Wha huh wha?

(chuckling amiably) Aw, alright, she isn't a gossip columnist, she's -- well, I'm not sure what she is but she writes for NRO so she must be something. You caught on right away, didn't you? What a disagreeable old man I have become.

Part of what makes me that way is this vision of an alternate universe where not just headline news, and the arts, and sports, but even tabloid celebrity burble must be about politics.

PS: I really just went to American Scene to grab the link, but can anyone explain this gibberish? "Levantine beauties," "men without chests," the notion that "increased levels of disposable income" make women in their mid-20s more attractive than women in their early 20s -- maybe "Reihan" doesn't exist at all except as a code name for Douthat's id.

UPDATE. Baseball Crank cries foul in comments, and he's right. (Following the Mets gets you a fair hearing at alicublog!) BC does not conflate baseball and politics. You have to go back to vintage Noonan for that kind of thing. Or Robert Ziegler. Or -- but I'm digging here. I can see that the politicization of sports is running behind the politicization of everything else -- but give it time.

WHO PAYS? Nicole Gelinas of the New York Post has been carefully planting explosives under the Mayoral candidacy of Freddy Ferrer. She's not the only one, of course; some local bullshit liberals have been saying the guy is too non-bullshit liberal to win against the beloved current Mayor, Richie Rich, and his dog Dollar. Take New York magazine, please:

Ferrer’s remarks are well tailored to his audience. This is a union-proud, racially diverse, stone-liberal crowd of academics and students, about half of whom wear anti-Bush buttons on their lapels. In other words, a strong sampling of the city’s leftish Democratic base...

Assembling only a textbook New York coalition of unions and racial special interests actually does Bloomberg a favor, however: It allows the mayor to spin his wealth as a positive, declaring himself unbought and unbossed, a plutocrat channeling Shirley Chisholm...

The author, Chris Smith, is probably the only person alive who looks at Michael Bloomberg and sees Shirley Chisholm. Scratch that; I don't he sees that, either. He's just casting about for metaphors, however feeble, to help explain the appeal of the Boston fixer beyond the distressingly simple fact that Giuliani pushed for him last election -- after of course pushing for himself -- and squeaked him by the useless Mark Green.

But that's how the cognoscenti do when they lose their guts. Local conservatives have their own methods. The Posties have been fanning the flames lit by some cop-friendly comments Ferrer made about the Diallo shooting years ago -- never mind that the Post itself has routinely excused every shooting of civilians by cops since the dawn of Rupert Murdoch.

In the intellectual wing of that movement, though, they have to come up with stronger stuff. Gelinas works the angle that Ferrer, even more than his less-electable competition for the Democratic nomination, is anti-business: "None of the four Dem candidates for mayor has much experience in the for-profit economy," she writes, "...But only one candidate is willing to repeatedly reveal his irredeemable lack of understanding of how private-sector Gotham works: former Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer."

Ferrer is suggesting that we address our large shortfalls of City revenue with taxes on big business -- in this instance, on stock transfers. Gelinas will have none of it. That will chase big business out -- "Wall Street isn't a captive of New York City, as it once was," she says.

In Gelinas' view, big business is in no way to be touched up for City revenue, or even addressed disrespectfully. She finds our cigarette taxes and the State's big-tobacco lawsuits equally noxious -- not on grounds of injustice to smokers, but because the transfer of funds from tobacco companies to the government is "hypocrisy"; and when City pension fund managers lean on companies like Winn Dixie on discrimination grounds, she sounds the tocsin at the City Journal: "No longer content merely to change corporate America from the outside, public-pension funds are now taking advantage of a chastened and weakened post-Enron corporate America to shift the focus of their political and economic power to the inside of the corporate boardroom. Their resolve to change the world one shareholder resolution, press release, and board election at a time spells trouble for taxpayers, U.S. corporations, and the national economy."

New York is of course not entirely a business-unfriendly environment; we give corporations tax breaks all the time, but despite the jobs this has safeguarded, we're still in the hole. Even Gelinas has noted that "From 1988 to 2000, [a Center for an Urban Future] report notes, Gotham handed out $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to 80 top-notch firms, simply to keep the jobs in the city. But half of those companies still moved jobs out of town." Such payoffs "have simply warped the city's growth pattern, at best." Her solution: cut other business taxes, such as "unforgivably regressive 8.625 percent tax on consumer goods [which] openly encourages merchants to leave," and thereby make a still more favorable climate for business.

One may ask, then, where Gelinas expects the money New York pressingly needs to come from. A hint comes in a recent Gerlinas essay on the parlous state of our subways. Along the way she calls for the usual conservative remedies: privitization, sticking it to the unions, etc. The firms that pick up the MTA's baton ought to do very well under this plan. But there is a constituency to whom Gelinas offers no surcease:

Cutting artificially high costs is one goal — but politicians must also allow the MTA to hike the artificially low price of a ride. Right now, city and state pols treat the subway as a social service — when the fare is raised, they complain of a regressive tax.

The MTA should ensure that fares cover the actual cost of a ride. Fares should cover operating costs (after federal and state capital grants), just as they did 100 years ago, and should be indexed yearly to inflation.

Will some low-wage workers be unable to pay? Sure — but the city and state governments can offer them vouchers based on need. Gov. Pataki could never stiff the city of that subsidy — or the poverty police would come knocking. (We'll take care of them later, one imagines Gelinas saying under her breath -- ed.)

Treating the subway as a market service paid for by customers, not as a social service subsidized by politicians, would improve the prospects of long-stalled projects.

These big, gleaming buildings, these roads, these trains, and whatever stadia Bloomberg and his allies muscle through -- they were not, and are not being, built for you, fellow citizens. In the new order, it will be made clear in the form of user fees, fare hikes, and whatever else you can or can't spare. Just don't ask the folks making huge profits off you to kick in a little. That wouldn't work; more to the point, it would be very unfair.

IT'S A GREAT LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN, OR EVEN IF YOU DO. Sometimes I get tired of my own anger, and wonder if it isn't a bad thing to keep up this blog. Every time I see an outrage (well, not every time, teeny-boppers -- I'd be on here 24-7, or whenever the public library was open, parked at a public terminal, surrounded by my shopping bags, wearing four coats and twelve days' growth of beard, and radiating a strong fungal musk) I open Blogger and vomit out a response; but like Harry Hope's liquor after Hickey has reformed, it don't have no kick no more, and I come away still seething.

Sometimes I think I need an alternative action plan -- anger management classes, Paxil, or some more lasting form of self-expression. Anything's gotta beat serving as the Bizarro-world equivalent of those poor fellows who regularly rise to denounce Che t-shirts or Mao in the library as if the kids' eyes hadn't been glazed like Krispy Kreme since word one and the janitor weren't already putting up the chairs.

So I did like the social worker suggested and made a list, and the upshot is I will keep it up a little longer anyway, as the reasons in favor are still compelling:

• Another year and I qualify for the blogger vesting program.
• When I finally get Peggy Noonan alone in a corner of some think-tank dinner and make her listen to my crappy proto-electronica, I can truthfully say, in a wheezing voice, "I wrote you letters, many letters, why haven't you answered my letters?"
• I'm right and they're wrong.

UPDATE. One of the tasks I set for myself as a young man was to stop fishing for compliments. It may be that, under the guise of thinking out loud, I dropped the flag with this post -- the only mystery greater than other people, after all, is oneself. I'm very grateful nonetheless for all the kind and (as usual) eloquent words in comments, even if you are all FBI agents, as the three-foot-tall green man in the corner insists. I expect to keep this popsicle stand open for a while yet.

NEXT ISSUE: HOW ABC'S "BLIND JUSTICE" IS REALLY A PLEA FOR PROMPT CONFIRMATION OF FEDERAL JUDGES. Thanks to Sun Myung Moon's top-down management style, even a simple review in the WashTimes of the Virginia Opera's Faust reflects the new realities:

...The nasty scene where Faust bullies the frantic Marguerite borders on the blasphemous, but proves a dramatic necessity, propelling the work toward its beatific vision of redemption. The work's emotional portrayal of moral conflict is sometimes derided by modernists as decidedly out of touch with contemporary sensibilities. Yet it somehow resonated strongly in this production, perhaps unintentionally illuminating Pope Benedict XVI's recent condemnation of the "dictatorship of relativism," and casting this opera in an entirely different context.

Perhaps unintentionally? Did they bring in wind machines and sand dunes to portray Faust's wanderings through "'deserts' of sprituality"? When Marguerite was swept into heaven, did Roy's Rock rise in her place? Was Mephistopholes given a fat suit, a movie camera, and a Flint, Michigan cap?

More to the point, why might Moon, who has already declared himself Messiah, pump up his competition? Perhaps he hopes to lull Benedict into a false sense of security -- then, when the Pope least expects it, out come the thunderbolts and all the glory associated with end times.

Maybe Benedict's in on it too, and they plan to put their apocalyptic death-match on pay per view.

BUT HOW DOES IT COMPARE WITH MUST-SEE THURSDAY? I could not get "Justice Sunday" on my little wire-hanger-reception TV, so you must look elsewhere for informed commentary. But without bragging too much on my predictive capacities -- I have long maintained that the nation would go to hell in a handbasket, and see, here we are! -- I can safely say that this show isn't going to do much for Senator Frist's cause. The serious Christers are already pledged up, and while mushy appeals to public decency and morality may sway some uncommitted souls in need of a stronger sense of redemption, the invocation of Christ as Bringer of Senate Procedural Reform seems a non-starter even in the church counties.

The highlight reel is pretty rich, though:

[Family Research Council] President Tony Perkins (!! -- ed.) said Democrats were using filibusters to exclude religious believers from the bench. Holding up a Bible, he told the audience, "What we are saying tonight is that as American citizens, we should not have to choose between believing what is in this book and serving the public."

A man waving a Bible on TV and asking for money is one thing, but a man waving a Bible on TV and asking for proxy support in a contest not involving colorfully-named wrestlers is just wasting everyone's time.

LATE BLOOMER. Finally saw Sideways. The objections to it touted by some people back when it was in theatres seem strange to me. Of course male critics, like any other filmgoers, will be flattered to see themselves in a main lead. But credentialed critics are successes, in that they are bylined and paid for doing what I am doing here for free; Miles is a chronic failure in a field closely related to theirs. Wouldn't they more likely view him as a loser -- somebody that they're demonstrably better than?

In fact, what I minded about Miles was that he is so ceaselessly stuck in gloom without being genuinely witty or otherwise appealing about it. His observations on everything except wine are purposely ridiculous whinging. Modern drama, and literature, and film are packed with attractive, indeed galvanic, underperformers -- Gray's Butley, Lowry's Consul, and Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea come to mind. If you must be damned, be stylishly damned!

Also, I never thought I'd say this, but Paul Giamatti doesn't help. He's a wonderful actor and his extreme sensitivity as a performer leads to a few heartbreaking moments, but his raging schlub bit gets hard to take sometimes -- well, many times. I mean, it's a road movie -- it's not a good thing if you keep wishing you could get out of the car.

Stephanie and Maya are a problem, too. The former isn't much more than a device, and the latter -- well, this may be where the Times guy got it from; she's so level and true that you have to wonder how she got placed in the same universe as Jack and Miles. And Payne really miscalculated with all the scene-setting; it doesn't add much to see California wine country in such lavish detail. Maybe Turning Leaf had a piece of the action.

Well, gee, Roy, that doesn't sound like much of a recommendation. So what's good? Mostly stuff that (forgive me) ripens over the course of the film. The dramaturgy is wicked smart. For example, throughout most of Sideways I wondered, what do these two guys see in each other? They spend most of the movie savagely attacking each other's actions and motivations. Good friends may do that, of course, but underneath it all you expect to see traces at least of the ties that bind.

Payne was subtle about this -- maybe over-subtle. The big clues came late: the attack at the golf course, and especially Miles' reclamation of Jack's wallet. After these the rest of their relationship, and the whole movie, made more sense. Jack may seem like a heedless horndog and Miles a volatile lush, but each has a strain of madness that the other can enjoy, if only because it's different and thereby more exciting to him than his own. Again, maybe too little too late, but how much better that is than something like the little speech Kevin Spacey gives in American Beauty to explain to us what a hot tamale his wife used to be before she got so anal.

And I liked Jack. He's a user, a dumbass, and a devious shit -- the way he melds his lie about himself with a lie about Miles, as a hedge against detection, would seem Machiavellian if he weren't so fucking dumb -- but the fact that he comes up with this shit solely by instinct, just to keep the party going, is part of his appeal. He's not charming, really, in the traditional movie sense; his shallowness is too obvious -- I think even Stephanie sees that from the get-go. But he's got an appetite for life that not only draws people to him but makes them feel happy and good about themselves. For a while, anyway.

Also -- and maybe mainly -- that's one hell of a coda. I'm not sure how much it needs the rest of the movie -- it needs Miles' journey, and it needs a casual remark by Maya at Stephanie's place, but not much more. I figured Miles would have to come around at the end, but I didn't expect his way of doing it to be so simple and so moving. Moral: A big finish, as they say in the show biz, takes care of a slow middle. And among the countless hours of crap I have watched in my time, I am grateful for every small epiphany.

SHOWING UP AT SHEA. Finally got out to Shea yesterday, and saw the Mets roll the Nationals 10-5. Seo got called up from Norfolk to replace the ailing Kaz Ishii; Seo didn't do much last year and hadn't been pitching well in Triple-A, I hear, but he was sharp in this game, and even drove in two runs himself. The Mets' playing was the usual mix of derring-do and derring-don't, botched batting and baserunning alternating with clutch plays, and fortunately this time the mix was weighted in our favor.

We could have got that from the TV, but of course the park offers its own blessings. Like the mook behind me who called me a retard for tipping the beerman; later he complained that he couldn't find a vendor. And the guy who had to leave early, causing his friends to chant "Da-nny! Da-nny!" after him, in the manner of the old "Daaa-rryl" serenade. A crowd of young teenage girls in hoodies stood at the back of the mezzanine and chanted double-dutch style for the team's success; some kids waved Mets signs written in Korean. A Washington batter got brushed back hard and someone bellowed the Nelson Muntz laugh, the sort of senseless cruelty that is inexcusable anywhere but in a major league ballpark, where usually only well-paid egos are bruised. The day was damp and cold and everyone complained but being miserable is a good part of Mets fandom, and winning just makes it a little nicer.

SHORTER HUGH HEWITT (Permalink irrelevant, doesn't seem to matter what day or month or year it is): Praise Jesus! Praise Jesus! Jesus! Praise Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! (Looka this joke I stole from Letterman.) Jesus! Jesus! Praise Jesus!

WHATTAYA WANT ME TO DO, SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU? DRAW YOU A PICTURE? DON'T ASK ME MORE! AS LONG AS YOU LIVE, DON'T EVER ASK ME MORE! Oh Jesus, they're still talking about Ward fucking Churchill at National fucking Review, and bawling how the evil liberals won't let them go to school:

There is bone-snapping pressure of conservative not even to pursue PhDs! I simply don't believe that the "chilling effect" on conservatives can get much worse. Meanwhile, the warm, nurturing, environment for champions of Jackassery couldn't be much more encouraging. Hang Churchill (metaphorically of course). Send a signal...

Studying Churchill like he was a lab rat isn't a good idea precisely because he is exactly that -- a lab rat. Typical in every way; the baseline. No one studies lab rats qua lab rats anymore. You only study them after you've done something to them. The only thing that would make Ward Churchill interesting for study is if you cut him loose. See how the other lab rats react. I'm sorry if I sound to Machiavellian...

You don't, Jonah. Machiavelli was smart.

The cognitive dissonance (for future NatRev contributors, that means when things don't make sense) is anted up on the same fucking page, when Steven Hayward brags on his alma mater, Claremont: "Most (not all) of my classmates have teaching jobs, usually at smaller, red-state colleges, and are reasonably happy, but on the merits many of them deserve to be department chairs or senior pooh-bahs at the top universities, but have been prevented from doing so by political correctness."

I'm heartily sick of saying this, but as long as these people maintain their pretense of stupidity in the service of their cause, I suppose I must repeat myself: So Fucking What? There are hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States. Right-wing crackpots seem not to have suffered from a lack of educational opportunities at Claremont, Bob Jones, Liberty University, the University of Tennessee, and other state-accredited and Jesus-approved institutions. (Even Hayward, citing Harvey Mansfield, agrees that lots of schooly-cons have been highly placed in the Bush Administration.) If a talented wingnut wishes to attend college, no liberal magisterium prevents him or her from doing so. Hell, even the barely literate Goldberg holds a degree.

And if these guys are as smart, and as right, as they insist they are, over time their academic nut-hatches should have acquired a reputation for intellectual probity, at least among the people they seem to care about. So what if the Times likes Yale men? The Republican managers of nearly everything are cool with a BA from Goucher. Yet the fuckers scream bloody murder against affirmative action for minorities, while they demand it for themselves.

Pardon me. I don't usually get so exercised at their moronism. I've come to expect that, and even their self-ridiculing arguments in defense of the indefensible. But I guess even a jaded soul such as mine has its limits, and when they use ignorance as a defense of their right to an Ivy League education, I... just... go... berserk!

I KNOW I'VE ASKED THIS QUESTION BEFORE but Condoleezza Rice's response to a query about America "exporting democracy" begs it again:

...from the practical point of view there is no necessity to export democracy. The people themselves feel that they want to have those freedoms that you get from democratic development. If you ask people whether they want to be able to say what they want to say, whether they want to practice whatever religion they chose, whether they want the freedom to educate their children, girls and boys, whether they want to be free from that knock on the door from the secret police, the people will say, yes, of course we want this. And that is why there is no need to export democracy or to implement democracy from above. People must be given the opportunity to freely express their wishes. And they will choose democracy, and so here I think the old terminology about exporting democracy has gotten old.

Very heartwarming, Madame Secretary, but if that is the case, why did we bomb the shit out of Iraq?

Also, all the other official reasons for invading Iraq having been rendered humorous, why are you discrediting the sole remaining (though admittedly risible from the start) "beachhead of democracy" one?

I'm guessing that even practiced liars suffer from burnout, and so will abandon wearisome rationales as soon as they are sure that no one is paying attention.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: Mary is appearing to the people! JPI foresaw his own demise! Crowds of people waiting for the new Pope -- who saw that coming? The Pope's election is a miracle! He is our father! He has twisted enemies and we must defend him from them! At last -- a Pope for adults!

(I guess the Riefenstahl of Reaganism's bit about "You can hit distracted people with all the propaganda in the world..." must be some sort of inside joke.)

WANNABES. Membership has its privileges, but so too has apostasy, and this alumnus of a working-class Catholic grammar school and a Jesuit prep is getting a great kick out of the present Popemania.

The National Review has gone fully bullgoose, slobbering over Ratzinger's election as if it were WIII; Kathryn Lopez leads the charge with breathless bulletins ("The Holy Spirit, it would seem, endorses orthodoxy, a la PJPII"); Jonah Goldberg contents himself with deep analysis of 24 and, after a feeble attempt to ingratiate himself with the hyperRomanists, takes a long lunch.

Maybe Goldberg will eventually get with the program and go the way of Lew Lehrman and Lawrence Kudlow -- major Cons converted to the One Holy & Apostolic via Opus Dei operative C. John McCloskey, who also numbers among his conquests the Tyco mouthpiece Mark Belnick, acquitted last year of fraud and grand larceny charges -- taste and see the goodness of the Lord, indeed!

The attraction of the True Faith for wingnuts amuses those of us born into it, though I imagine it is a deadly serious matter for the world's Hewitts, who find the mission of the Church identical to that of American conservatism -- that is, not just a containment of but an end to homosexuality, adultery, and indeed every sin but covetousness, which modern Catholicism has enshrined as a positive virtue.

Whether they take to the Faith or not, it is clear these folks are looking for something like confirmation -- not the bit where the Bishop slaps you, quite, but some sign that something grand has touched them and endorsed, with glamorous robes and ethereal choirs, their cause to the Heavens. No less a Lutheran than Jim Lileks raves -- with harrumphs about "Maryolatry" (that should appease the dour local squareheads) -- that Ratzinger "wants there to be a core to which we can be shocked," that his election is a rebuke to "happy-clappy relativism," that the very name Benedict is "bracing," etc. Poor Jimbo: someone ought to stuff some incense into his vaporizer (he is currently suffering from his 74th cold of the season) and drape him with some Vatican bling, that he may dream himself into a cathedral and imagine his Nyquil the Blood of Christ.

Our President laid a few words of praise on the new Pope before heading to Springfield, IL to dedicate the new Lincoln Museum. This Museum is a very modern affair, reports the Washington Post:

It also features high-tech, Disney-style exhibits that museum curators say are aimed at making Lincoln's story more accessible... In one exhibit, Lincoln, who historians say was a lenient father, is reading the paper while one of his sons tosses an inkstand and another swings a broom as if it were a bat. In an exhibit recreating the White House kitchen, fictional conversations of black kitchen workers gossiping about the seances led by Mary Lincoln and rumors of Lincoln issuing an Emancipation Proclamation are piped in

These hilarious accomodations to modern lack of taste notwithstanding -- or perhaps withstanding, given the circumstances -- the President sought to defend his actions in the Middle East with the example of the Great Emancipator:

Our interests are served when former enemies become democratic partners -- because free governments do not support terror or seek to conquer their neighbors. Our interests are served by the spread of democratic societies -- because free societies reward the hopes of their citizens, instead of feeding the hatreds that lead to violence... We see that example and courage today in Afghanistan and Kyrgystan, Ukraine, Georgia and Iraq. We believe that people in Zimbabwe and Iran and Lebanon and beyond have the same hopes, the same rights, and the same future of self-government. The principles of the Declaration still inspire, and the words of the Declaration are forever true. So we will stick to it; we will stand firmly by it. (Applause.)

We might imagine Lincoln, a great writer as well as a great man, considering this flimsy bit of hired oratory; we might imagine him as one who favored high tariffs to protect American labor, and whose Presidency was wholly occupied by an attempt to preserve the Union, observing his legacy enlisted in an attempt to shift attention from our own ruined economy and deep divisions toward a fond hope for foreign amity. We might also imagine the Prince of Peace Himself looking down upon the highly politicized machinations of his alleged followers, and their unchurched wannabes, here on earth. But that would just be sad. Let us rather rejoice that these fools make such a glorious spectacle, and say unto them, as the old queen did unto the priest swinging his censer at High Mass, "Darling, love the dress, but your purse is on fire."

UPDATE. Hours later, National Review's staff are still rolling in Romanism, none more so than their People of the Book and I Don't Mean God And Man At Yale. Goldberg even makes a column of it, on the premise that he and Benedict have in common a hatred of the 60s ("almost everyone in the so-called 'generation of '68' was intellectually violent"). David Klinghoffer goes further, says not just he and Jonah but all Jews have a lot in common with the new Pope; for instance, ultrareligious Catholics are not moral relativists, and ultrareligious Jews (unlike those schnorrers at the Anti-Defamation League!) are also not moral relativists. Who knew? Something else, Klinghoffer adds, "our two religions share: the assumption that there is a truth out there, a singular truth, to be found and embraced." Yeah, not like Ratzinger's old employers, the Nazis -- those guys didn't know what they wanted! Sigh. Well, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but politics is politics.

Finally some brave editor decides to stick up for materialism with this piece of P.J. faux-Rourke, in which the author affects not to know that Joe Walsh was joking and Alex P. Keaton is no longer a heart-throb.

THE GODLINESS GAP. Brendan Miniter says, we Americans have the best of everything, but we have fallen so far behind in godliness that we cannot field a Cardinal who would be competitive in the Pope Olympics.

Here is an opportunity for American Fundamentalist Christians who do not mind turning their collars! I'm sure Miniter would agree that no one beats our Christers for godliness; Rick Santorum certainly lacks any squeamishness in the demonstration of his faith, and ought to take to Maundy Thursday foot-washing like a duck to water.

Who knows? If we can sufficiently mainstream Catholicism in this country, maybe the nets will give us a stateside version of Father Ted.

UPDATE. Ratzinger has been elected and will bear the name Benedict XVI. Like the former Pope, Ratzinger saw his native country invaded and overrun by Communists.

DIVISION OF LABOR. I see that the current criticism of Juan Cole (that part of it, at least, you don't have to pay for) boils down to this:

Per Michael Totten*, Cole likes Edward Said, who is liked by "Islamic fundamentalists," who hate the West therefore etc. This intellectual game of Telephone eventually allows a link to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which will be no shock to seasoned observers of the schtick.

Per the Ole Perfesser, his buddies don't like Cole, so why read him?

The actual Juan Cole site is a useful roundup of news from, and recent history of, the Middle East, with far fewer references to Orientalism and abstruse theories of race than these guys would lead you to believe; while there are some brooding asides that smell of the classroom, Cole seems to pad his stuff far less with theoretical analysis than, say, Hugh Hewitt pads his with Jesus and ecclesiasticals.

Which is to say that you can actually find out what's going on at Cole's site. And that's the alleged beauty of the blogosphere, right? Cole tells you about alliances, rifts, and battles in the region, and the other guys tell you about soldiers giving toys to Iraqi children. We are all free to choose whatever blend suits our prejudices.

*UPDATE. The post at the Totten site was actually written by one Mary Madigan, so consider "Michael Totten" in that instance as a brand name.

SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON: How dare Alan Rickman make a play about that Rachel Corrie woman, who claims to have been killed by Israelis (cough, bloodlibel). Such accusations of heedless violence make me want to commit heedless violence. Fucking artists.

OF COURSE YOU KNOW THIS MEANS CULTURE WAR! PART 4,388. While, like all thinking people, I am just about convinced that the Jesus freaks will soon rampage through our cities, torching libraries and forcibly installing v-chips, I have to admit that at this moment they just seem pretty silly.

Here, for example, is a Democrat preaching Culture War to whatever Democrats read rightwing nutmag OpinionJournal -- though as the author, Dan Gerstein, was Joe Lieberman's communications director, he must be used to small crowds.

Gerstein starts by attacking Frank Rich, whose "arrogance and narrow-mindedness... typifies the cultural thinking of our elites," etc. As this familiar rite is enacted, one's attention wavers, leaving time to wonder how many of those gosh-darned wonderful, salt of the earth moms and dads out there even know who the fuck Frank Rich is, and how folks like Gerstein would fare at an actual meeting of these folks if he seriously tried to convince them that their TV is full of swears because the former drama critic of the New York Times failed to criticize the coprolaliac excesses of Friends.

He may get away with it; his caution against "cynical Sister Souljah moments" suggests that he actually believes this tripe, and sincerity plays well in the heartland. Better, his model for winning over the values voter -- replicating the fight against Joe Camel by substituting a potty-mouthed David Schwimmer for the decommissioned cigarette spokescartoon -- further suggests that Gerstein is the sort of fellow who could do something that cynical without ever realizing how cynical he is being, and America has always cherished such types (high self-regard plus low self-awareness -- presidential timber!).

Hey, wait a minute. Why am I even accepting the possibility that anyone involved in this crap is in any way sincere? How could I let Small Precautions beat me to the obvious conclusion:

...the weakness of the argument aside, I couldn't help wonder, What is the WSJ doing giving space for "us" to talk about what the Democrats ought to be doing in the culture wars. The answer appears in the last two paragraphs: it turns out that the author of the article wants to promote Hillary as the proper moral face of the party.

And promoting Hillary is, of course, a highly desireable thing for the WSJ, since Hillary is exactly whom the Republicans would most like to see the Democrats nominate in 2008, since Hillary is unelectable nationally.

Am I losing my edge? I must go stare into the abyss for a while; watching Hewitt denounce comparisons of the Fundies with the Taliban as "anti-Christian rhetoric" and "hate speech" (we like Unitarians, Hugh -- do they count?) ought to sharpen me up.

AN OLD SHELL GAME MADE NEW. The usual suspects are flogging it, but the debut of Brian C. Anderson's South Park Conservatives book suffers from particularly bad timing: just as Anderson's trying to tell the world how wonderfully hip, fun, and politically incorrect the Right is, it seems all the top conservatives are either professing love for deceased anti-porn scold Andrea Dworkin, or screaming for Jesus, the Pope, and Terri Schiavo.

In fact, when the Schiavo became the subtext of an actual South Park show a few weeks back, the alleged party-boys and -girls of wingnut valhalla were strangely quiet -- not surprisingly, as the episode included the spectacle of Satan mind-controlling pro-lifers. (Swanky Conservative did gush, "I can’t wait to see where Trey & Matt take this," then never followed up.)

South Park conservatism attempts to play both ends against the middle -- like when Rupert Murdoch uses page-3 tits and tabloid sensationalism to finance political shills who denounce a decline in public morals. More than anything, perhaps, it reflects the pathos of political operatives -- or people in any line of work, for that matter -- who try to win advantage by announcing how very hip they are.