THE CULTURE WAR'S REAR ECHELON. Writing is a hard dollar in any case, so I can understand why a lot of marginal scribes have over the years flocked to National Review, the Claremont Institute, etc: they're always hiring, it seems. I have myself written utter hogwash for corporate clients, so I will not judge these factota on moral grounds. (Oscar Wilde could. When a friend of his whose hackwork offended Wilde shrugged, "A man must eat," Wilde replied, "In your case, I fail to see the necessity.") But as a professional, even as a mercenary, I find myself increasingly offended by the increasingly low quality of their work.

Not that it was ever good. During the Reagan-era goldrush of right-wing propaganda gigs, tractability trumped talent -- prickly Old Guard authors like Karl Hess gave way to faux-contrarian bloviants like R. Emmett Tyrell (who, with the aid of a thesaurus, impersonated an author just badly enough to convince the sub-literate that he was one, and thus emblematized his profession and his age).

But nowadays it's even worse. Consider that it took two authors to write this. Most of the piece summarizes the plot of a comic book -- and while this job is poorly performed, it at least gives the reader some tangible details and images; the passages that are (apparently) meant to analyze the comic book actually make it harder to tell what the thing is doing or trying to do:

If satire is the stuff of Jonathan Swift — intelligent, probing, witty, sharp, and scathing — then Liberality falls woefully short. It is, in fact, none of those things. Walking a blurry line between oblivious self-parody and conscious self-deprecation, it is a hysterical, hilarious romp through a nightmarish right-wing fantasy land...

Regardless of how Liberality's humor is intended, it's there in spades. On the back cover of one of the comic books, Hannity's metal fist clenches a squirming caricature of an Arab terrorist by the throat, holding him up in a gesture of triumphant contempt. Purposefully or not, it is the perfect culmination of this carnival of colorful absurdity.

How does this sort of thing get published?

Desperation is a possibility. Figure that every young toff who announces himself to the wingnut network by joining the local YAF or Protest Warriors chapter will eventually be recruited by agents of Scaife or Moon. These lads and lasses cannot be forever happy working in the mailroom. They know that to break out, they either have to blow George Roche (or his not-yet-disgraced equivalent), or publish something high-profile enough to make a name and a place on the path to editorships and junior analyst slots.

Think how many essays this must engender! And think what sort of people are writing them: Bible-college yearbook editors; clench-fisted debate-club nerds; and, probably more than anything else, political hacks who sincerely believe that literary greatness, like everyone and everything else they have yet encountered in their short lives, must fall to their energy and powers of persuasion.

For the most part these are young people who lack both the experience to comment sensibly on real-life experiences, and the patience or depth to comprehend theoretical abstractions. And, like nearly everyone else in these United States, they think that first-class writing is distinguished not by clarity but by opacity.

So they pick topics that will not get them called for ignorance -- because their editors don't know about them, and nobody else cares about them: comic books, movies, TV shows, celebrity bloggers, etc. On such bare themes the young Turks hang words, metaphors, subordinate clauses and apothegms in (their articles suggest) whatever order they happen to come to minds only hazily acquainted with the rules and traditions of English composition.

Like all amateur artisans, they lay their materials on thick. When they make a mistake or intuit how lost they are, they just add more. Eventually the accretion is so monstrous that it seemes singular: maybe, the budding authors muse, this is what they mean by style.

Such monstrosities pour over an editor's transom. The editor sighs; there is no money in the budget for remedial education, and he has no time to educate all the sprats himself. He keeps hoping they'll get better; but they don't. They spend their free time horsing around. The males try to mack on the females, and the females try to make each other jealous. The editor wonders why they didn't go into advertising. Maybe if Rupert Murdoch owned an agency...

Meanwhile his boss -- a moneyed crackpot who lives in a Georgian mansion in North Dakota and practices incessantly at his private rifle range to prepare for the coming Mexifornian invasion -- looks in: any new talent coming up?

The editor hands over some of the less deformed creations. The boss scans the copy of one, cannot make heads nor tails of it. This is not unusual, but it seems even worse today; maybe, he thinks, it's time for a new contact lens prescription.

Nonetheless he sees keywords of which he approves -- Hannity, Liddy, Limbaugh, Rand -- and that pleases him. That's usually as much as he needs to see when reviewing the magazine, certainly: he will trace the conservative signifiers just far enough to assure himself they are connected with flattery, and the liberal signifiers far enough to assure himself they are wedded to scorn.

In this respect, all is well with the article; if he cannot quite follow the through-line, he figures, it may be a "youth" thing. The kids have their own language; funny books, iPods and so forth. Who is he to judge? The boy wouldn't be aboard if he weren't right on the issues.

And his approving grunt cues the dawn of a brilliant career.

It may of course be simpler than that. Maybe the places are like monkey houses before the advent of humane zoo management: a chaos of screams, leaps, and masturbation. Maybe the cause is not so much editorial desperation as depravity. Maybe the stuff is generated by computer programs while the interns and tyros lay around the office smoking crack.

But speculating on it sure beats the snot out of reading it.

WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR AGAIN? The U.S. military is planting pro-U.S. stories in Iraqi papers. Jeff Goldstein thinks that's OK -- indeed, commendable, because "the truth of the matter is, we need to win the war before we can worry about leaving behind a pristine democracy..." (not to mention intact buildings, electrical grid, etc). He also says people who don't like it, including Justin Gardner and the editors of Reason, are engaged in "sanctimonious posturing," "gin[ned]-up outrage," etc.

When guys like Goldstein start hollering at guys like Gardner (of Donklephant, a centrist site that makes Joe Lieberman look like Eugene Debs), you know their war isn't going well.

Goldstein also says the frauds are "no different than, say, the LA Times or the New York Times reprinting press-releases from the anti-gun lobby." Sadly, he does not list their rates. But I'll bet the Iraqi papers charge much less!

THE DECLINE OF THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL CLASS, PART INFINITY. It's late 2005, but National Review Online runs yet another gurgler about how South Park is rilly neat and conservative and neat. Jesus Christ. Must be the right-wing equivalent of a golf penalty -- "That's alright, old chap. Just write us a South Park piece and we'll call it square." "Decent of you, Dickie. Here, I'll use this cocktail napkin."

This one is dumber than most, and includes this prescription:

In World War II our most talented writers, directors, and actors helped the war effort. This time around we might similarly challenge young, creative Americans who understand the streets of the Middle East, the humor of the young there, and what forms of ridicule could really work against the Baathists, the Shiite theocrats in Tehran, al Qaeda, and the Wahhabis. It should be possible to figure out how such a team could be guided by Parker’s and Stone’s genius.

Might the article actually be a plant for Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World? Alas, no. The byline reads "R. James, Suzanne, Robert, Daniel, and Benjamin Woolsey." R. James Woolsey, his 2001 bio tells an incredulous us, "is an attorney and former director of the C.I.A (1993-1995) who labels U.S. policy on Iraq over the past ten years 'feckless.' He strongly advocates a thorough investigation into Iraq's possible linkage to terrorist attacks against the U.S. and has sought to prove the Iraq connection in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing." Well, no wonder he's spending a lot of time with his family these days!

You may think this is the nadir, friends, but so long as Jonah Goldberg draws cupcake fumes, there is always a lower depth. Watch for it!

FURTHERMORE, FUCK YOU. Prairie putz James Lileks has enjoyed imagining New York nuked. Now a spate of upcoming national-disaster shows gives him that old feeling:

If they were smart they would run two shows Tuesday and Wednesday night, one set in Midwestern town of medium size, the other set in New York. The latter would collapse into anarchy, I suspect, and the former would do nicely. A town like Fargo, for example, doesn’t need elevators. New York is rather dependent on them. Elevators and money. Take them away, and what do you have? More good people than bad, but guess which side has most of the guns... The Fargo series would be different, of course. Smaller towns tend to be more socially cohesive. Plus, all that wheat and all those guns.

Yeah, we city folk don't know how to handle a shootin' ahrn. And we don't know how to live among people, either, not like the folks in Lileksland:

In Minnesota, local news stations filmed people getting trampled at the front entrance as hundreds poured into a local Wal-Mart. Extreme measures were used in the northwest where some stores used police to control the mob. One policeman in Washington used pepper spray to stop shoppers from endangering each other.

If you fucking hicks can't act civil-like during Black Friday, I shudder to think how you'll handle Doomsday.

As for us, we had a bit of a disaster four years ago. Handled it pretty well. Asshole.

UPDATE. Sample response: "I'm from MN. fuck you." This gentleman is well within his rights. When responding to insults to my hometown, I sometimes fall back on the barroom argumentative style, and forget that other patrons may hear it and take it amiss. Apologies to the good folks all over this great land of ours who are not adult males living at Jasperwood.

WHAT A REPUBLICAN CALLS HIMSELF WHEN HE WANTS TO GET LAID. The sirens went off and the local precinct has been notified. Volokh:

For instance, the long New York Review of Books article not once mentions the word "libertarian," while at the same time treating libertarians, such as InstaPundit, as "conservatives." InstaPundit (the most widely read of the "conservative" blogs that the author mentions) does have seemingly "conservative" takes on many issues, but of course it's miles away from conservatives on many social policy issues.

... sorry, could hardly catch my breath for a moment. No matter how many times I hear it, the Instapundit/libertarian gag still cracks me up.

The Ole Perfesser's observable priorities begin, of course, with self-promotion. Second place goes to promotion of that thing they call the Blogosphere (which in his case is nearly the same thing as self-promotion). But thereafter it's all straight-up conservative politics and support for the Republicans who implement them.

One need only scan any given page of the Perfesser's site to see how deeply in the bag for the GOP he is. Hell, even at this writing (with the Perfesser pointing to the Volokh cite!), here's what we find:

• Love to Lieberman, the Kaus of Connecticut;
• Homage to John Bolton;
• Hiss boo to Kyoto;
• Stroking internet commerce;
• Times-bashing;
• Link to incredibly feeble rightwing clown who will hereafter be the Perfesser's loyal slave;

Etc. ad nausuem. Check it yourself if so inclined.

As a Volokh commenter put it, "Note, for example, that [Reynolds] has blogged about the Sandy Berger scandal a whopping 102 times, but has mentioned the Abramoff scandal exactly once. 101-1 is pretty telling, is it not?"

Whither the Perfesser's libertarian cred? Hell, during the last election he even bailed on gay marriage, shrugging that it was a "generational thing" not worth getting riled over, and sternly warning his gay readers that opposing Bush and the FMA would cost them in the long run: "It's possible to package gay marriage as a move toward traditional values and away from 1970s style hedonism (not that there's anything wrong with that). But again, you have to make the case, not call names, if you want to win people over."

So every once in a while he talks smack about the Patriot Act, while working hard to make sure the people who wrote and passed it stay in office. He does seem to support teen sex -- in fact, he takes a keen interest in it -- and Lord how that man loves guns. But that makes him more eligible for a spot on an FBI watch-list than on the editorial board of Reason.

Let's be frank. Real libertarians are as rare as pieces of the True Cross. There are plenty of guys who'll say they're "mostly libertarian" when there are social or sexual points to be scored by it. There are celebrities who use their swingin' libertarianism as a differentiator within their market: their libertarian rap may be no more substantial than the equivalent liberal rap of the Robbins-Sarandon crowd, but the cool factor is much higher. You can call them libertarians if you like; I prefer the more old-fashioned usages, "fraud," "hypocrite," and "bullshit artist." (Say, maybe the Perfesser is a libertarian after all!)

BONUS. My person favorite libertarian site right now is Build Freedom. They're feel-good, empowerment types. They preach "libertools" -- that is, "any tool that can be used to liberate yourself from an 'unwanted condition' in your life... Pecunix, e-gold, and similar alternative currencies and payment systems may become powerful libertools for individual economic empowerment." They quote Ayn Rand. They praise "freedom engineering" and bemoan the tyrannical State. They invite you into their "Coalition of Freedom Lovers" ("Anarcho-Capitalists, Classical Liberals, Conservatives, Constitutionalists..." etc). And they also invite you into their money-making schemes ("Find out more about 'Mr. X' and 'Blind Front-End Marketing!'").

Water finding its own level -- that's what freedom's all about, baby!

NICE FREEDOM OF SPEECH YOU GOT HERE. BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING WAS TO HAPPEN TO IT. (JOSTLES PRINTING PRESS.) In a recent Captain's Quarters fumlination on the damn librul media, we find this odd note:

Until the media starts reporting honestly from Iraq, the divergence will continue to grow as civilians continue to operate from ignorance, while the military operates from a position not only of intelligence but from experience. The real danger presented will be the self-fulfillment of the Starship Troopers (movie, not book) paradigm, where the only people qualified to control the military are the military themselves -- and the press will have created that atmosphere based on their short-sighted adherence to their anti-military and anti-Bush biases.

The cautious use of the word "danger" notwithstanding, doesn't this guy sound excited by the prospect of entering the Spartan world of Starship Troopers for really-real? Maybe someone ordered a life-size Carmen Ibanez action figure for Christmas!

The psychopathology continues in comments:

Ever read "Seven Days in May"? If the liberals and their MSM counterparts are successful, that old 60's novel may be way more prophetic than even its author intended.

It is an observable fact that American conservatives are getting weirder by the day, but it still throws me when they take famous fascist-takeover scenarios and blame the outcomes on liberals. I wonder if they think the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves by acting too Semitic.

REWRITE. The actual Iraq war isn’t going so hot, so rightwing citizen journalists are putting their hope in the movie version:

Bruce Willis is apparently making a film based on the superb Iraq War reporting of blogger Michael Yon…

Okay... finally a pro-democracy, pro-US involvement feature film about Iraq. I'm placing a bet right now this movie will go through the roof, to the consternation of many of Willis' peeers.

Simon’s I-betcha I-betcha fantasizing is carried forward in comments by various littlebrains proposing that Bruce Willis put Warren Beatty in his movie and then kick his ass.

Though Simon is a Hollywood insider, I got the drop on him with these leaked pages from the original Willis screenplay of The Boys of Company 9/11:

(As sunlight glints Michael-Baystyle on the desert sands, the Boys move in slow-motion over the ridge: GAMER HOUSTON, a goateed demolitons expert who carries a rifle and a skateboard; CHARLIE WANNAMAYKSUMTHINUVIT, a quarrelsome Cherokee with a doctorate in astrophysics; SCUNGILLI “SCUZZ” DYSLEXIA, a street-wise street-kid born on the streets with street-smarts; GRIMACEOUS T. “ME HUNGRY” JONES, a large, simpleminded Negro; and their leader, Sgt. BUTCH COJONES.)

COJONES: Alright boys, take a break.

(All flop to the ground except CHARLIE, who keeps walking)

SCUZZ: Eyyyy, yah crazy Injun! Da Sarge says take a break!

CHARLIE: (stopping) I did not hear the husky, masculine whisper of Big Chief.

SCUZZ: Well, get de feathers outta yer ears, Red Man! I wanna win dis war pronto and get back to de Apple by Rosh Hashanah.

JONES: M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-me hungry.

GAMER: Yo Sarge, so we’re stopping in like the middle of this like desert? What’s up with that?

COJONES: You boys ever hear of “rope-a-dope"?

SCUZZ: Yeah, sure, I know dat one! We usedta play dat routine on the Yancey Street gang! Yuh go someplace where yer pract’cly beggin’ ta get massacred, see, but yuh leaves a few guys hidin’ out nearby; so when de udder gang comes on out ta massacre yuh, den your udder guys crack dere skulls! Some fun! Dat what we’re doin’, boss?

COJONES: Yeah, that’s what we’re doin’, Scuzz. Only there’s a catch. We don’t have a second wave from our own gang to help us when the fighting starts.

GAMER: Like what! Like why not?

COJONES: (lighting up a Camel straight) ‘Cause some sob-sister ex-Marine Democrat got ‘em pulled out of Iraq, that’s why.

SCUZZ: Lousy no-good Democrats! I don’t know why I keep votin’ for ‘em!

JONES: W-w-w-w-w-w-w-when we start k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-killin’, boss?

CHARLIE: (ear to the ground) The trembling of the earth says killing comes soon, oh large, marginally-retarded one.

(Hundreds of TERRORISTS are coming fast over the sands on genetically-modified super-camels. They brandish rifles and the severed heads of hostages, and wear giant I HEART SADDAM buttons. They are led by Princeton Professor CORNEL WEST, to the back of whose super-camel is tied COJONES’ girlfriend, TESS, wearing provocatively-torn clothing.)

COJONES: (aiming rifle) Try not to hit Tess, boys. I sure would love a bowl of her chili when this thing’s over.

(Extended battle scene. Each of COJONES’ men kills dozens of TERRORISTS, sometimes while making character-appropriate wisecracks – e.g., “You are like so dead” and “Dat’s for me brudder – he got a bad falafel onct.” Intercut scenes show MICHAEL MOORE and SATAN at their San Francisco bunker, observing the battle on closed-circuit TV. For a time the battle seems lost; JONES is badly wounded, and lies across a fallen camel with arms outstretched in a Christlike manner. Then, miraculously, thousands of ordinary IRAQIS come running over the sands to bury the TERRORISTS in flowers and toppled statues. Their leader, FEHEED “ROCKY” ISHKABIBBLE, riding a white stallion, calls out to COJONES:)

ISHKABIBBLE: Hey, Cojones! Got a present for you! (He holds up the severed head of RAMSEY CLARK.) With the thanks of a grateful nation!

JONES: (as his wounds are tended) R-r-r-r-r-r-r-radical!

SCUZZ: Is dat yer final answer?

(The BOYS all go “woo” and hug everybody.)

Unfortunately this fragment does not include the final “Showdown at the U.N.” scene, but I’m told that Warren Beatty is being considered to play Kofi Annan, who gets his ass kicked.

IT'S CRAP, AND IT'S CONSERVATIVE! We are always being told by our wingnut brethren that the liberal media ceaselessly indoctrinates helpless citizens into buggery, bestiality, treason etc.

But when polls make conservatives gloomy, they apparently get in the mood for counterintuitive changes of perspective. Then it is time for S.T. Karnick, whose stock in trade is to find conservative-safe TV shows and report hopefully on them. Last December, in a review of House (!), Karnick wrote, "A few TV episodes do not a religious revival make, but they are much more than we had a decade ago."

Now Karnick sees double-plus-good messaging all across the boob tube -- but with this caveat:

...in network TV in recent years the unconventional has increasingly been used to make conventional moral points. Thus comedies today are bluer than ever before, but they indicate a serious longing for more order in the characters' romantic lives. Similarly, today's dramas are blood-red but express a positive view of conventional morals.

Let's look at some of Karnick's examples of this Great Awakening:

Hot Properties (ABC) tells the story of three female real-estate agents, and guess what: more sex jokes. In the premiere episode, sluttish behavior by two of the agents came back to haunt them — but not enough to make a moral point.

Hear that, ABC? Next time make it more like Don Giovanni. That's TV comedy gold.

...CBS's How I Met Your Mother tells the story of a conservative, young, urban male who really wants to get married and has found the woman he thinks is right for him. The comedy flows from the fact that the cues regarding romance no longer make sense to such a person.

I've seen this show, and "flows" is not a good word for what the "comedy" does. The "cues regarding romance" appear to bellowed zero entendres which would not make sense to anyone, liberal or conservative.

I am particularly fond of this one:

Fox's Kitchen Confidential and ABC's Freddie follow the same format of showing the value of traditional morality while presenting lots of overly frank, sexually oriented jokes and story material.

What does it say for traditional morality that you have to spike it with tit jokes and sleaze in order to get people to swallow it?

Of course, under all the bullshit, there is a kernel, tiny and hard, of truth: very old-fashioned ideas can adopt a contemporary guise. That's why directors keep dressing Shakespeare characters like cowboys, corporate lawyers, etc. But this stuff here ain't Shakespeare. It's just the usual crap with homey sentiments stuck to the ass-end in order to fool suckers.

Looks like it works, too.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. Snotty atheists are like Marxists and scientists who think I love my wife and turkey sammiches because of the chemicals. But God must exist because burp, wet fart, tee hee. (Runs out of room.)

(Warning: only read the Goldberg if your tolerance to him has been built up over time. It damn near made me puke, and I'm a expert spelunker.)

GET READY FOR ANOTHER "LIBERALS ARE RACISTS" THREAD! The folks at OpinionJournal are grateful for...

Our friends the Mongolians. The press corps had a high old time mocking President Bush for visiting Ulan Bator this week, but Americans are lucky Mongolians aren't as cynical as journalists. Despite its small population, the country is keeping 150 of its troops in Iraq. As recent converts to democracy, Mongolians have a better appreciation for freedom's struggles than do certain Europeans we know...

...not to mention certain (that is, most) citizens of the United States, who, as BTC News points out, find Bush less acceptable than torture. (Though Bush is apparently ahead in polling for the Heisman Trophy... oops, wrong Bush.)

You take your advantages where you can: Conservative Voice sees great things in the U.S.-Mongolia alliance: "Mongolia Could Become a Strategic Ally," it proclaims, without offering any reasons why the economically-frail, sparsely-populated nation would so serve, other than this: "In the 13th Century Chinggis Khan brought China to its knees and made his Mongol warriors the most feared and respected Cavalry on Earth." Maybe Bush's plan is to bring someone dressed like this to his next meeting with Putin, and have him pick his own teeth with his sword while glaring like Odd Job at the Russian President.

I see a problem with the budding alliance, though. Didn't Genghis Khan outlaw torture?

"WHAT IS THIS, DISCOVERY?" WELL, IN A WAY, MS. ALTHOUSE. Ann Althouse tells us that rude jokes at Atrios mean that Democrats (not merely Atrios and his commenters, but Democrats) believe "women who don't hew to liberal dogma deserve sexual harassment." She doesn't accept Atrios' claim that the jokesters had their tongues in their cheeks:

Sexist jokes galore, and I ought to just learn to laugh about it. He seems to lack a shred of sensibility about how pathetically retro-male chauvinist that is. I'll say it again: Democrats have a long, long way to go to convince me that they care at all about feminism.

Wait till Althouse sees Blazing Saddles! Then we're in for a long, dotty post about all those racist white Hollywood actors tossing around the word "nigger."

Thankfully for Althouse, there is an alternative to the chauvinist Dems: the Republican Party. We may assume she finds the GOP more in sync with her wymyn-friendly agenda, as she voted for and reliably supports the Bush Administration, and her faith in them is such that, when SCOTUS candidate Alito was revealed to say that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," Althouse responded positively, saying she was looking forward to the "debate" comparing "the full set of conservative legal positions... with the liberal positions."

One thinks of John Reed walking up the steps of the Imperial Palace in Reds: "Boy, this Kerensky's some socialist!"

To be crystal clear: I can imagine an abortion-neutral and even an anti-abortion feminism, and even grasp the concept that people who joke about being sexist dirtbags may be covering up for actual sexist dirtbaggism.

Pointing out the (theoretical) hypocrisy of others, however, is not proof of one's own intellectual consistency. Althouse claims her feminist mantle by proclamation. That's her right, of course. I could call myself a monarchist, or a member of the Greenback Party -- it's a free country. And I guess I could insist, as Althouse does, when people point out that my postings in no way support such a self-interpretation, that it would take hours for me go dig up proof to the contrary, which it is not worth my while to do.

And it isn't, unless you wish to make an argument capable of being taken seriously by serious people. But if identity politics is your thing -- as increasingly seems to be the vogue on the right -- then why bother?

UPDATE. Echidne of the Snakes called this bullshit earlier and better.

UPDATE II. Topic engenders predictable willful misapprehension. CV's commenter is a peach, too: "The Left swallows everything up into its government-control agenda. They use workers, Negroes, women, homosexuala, Jews to promote socialism and Communism -- and then discard them when they have outlived their usefulness to the collective." What, we're already done with the Negroes? I needed them for my production of The Green Pastures!

BLUE MONDAY BARF BAG: A CLEVERLY-NAMED MISCELLANY. Someday I'll graduate from this blog bush league and become a real live pundit. Then I can talk about TV celebrities whom I think have gone too far:

...I found Penn Jillette's "This I Believe Essay" on NPR this morning to be particularly grating and representative of a strand of atheistic libertarianism I loathe...

First off, you've seen Jonah Goldberg, right? Try to imagine him saying the word "loathe." Goldberg's a full tank shy of the George Sanders hauteur necessary to pull off a word like that. In fact I don't even think he pulls off "atheistic libertarianism." It's like Cousin It reciting the Gettysburg Address.

The object of Goldberg's loathing is Jillette's ode to atheism. Jillette finds the idea of God ridiculous; Goldberg finds this "a form of bullying" of the sort that the large and powerful atheists' lobby is always pulling on the small, underprivileged Judeo-Christian caucus. Then Goldberg drags in the theological support of... Greg Easterbrook! Finally a colleague of Goldberg finds a way of saying he's a hypocrite and an ass without getting fired -- smart fellow -- and Goldberg says, you don't understand, it was Jillette's tone of voice. "Perhaps you should listen to the tone of Jillette's comments," he dudgeons, "as it's difficult for the printed word to capture the full extent of his smirking condescension." Yes, folks, Jonah "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey" Goldberg accuses someone else of smirking condescension! Then he deep-throats a pound cake. Well, no, I mean I don't know but I believe and who are you to judge me, heathen?

But as I was saying: when I go big-time, I'll be able to impose my bullshit paradigms on children's entertainment:

J.K. Rowling's bleak vision of government

Well, I...

No. I can't submit you good people to a lengthy blockquote from this thing -- you have lives, families. Here, though, is a perfectly illustrative short section: "I recall a variety of businesses that come off rather well in Rowling's books, including the Weasley twins' burgeoning joke business..." The author also addresses countervailing POVs on the specific, hidden political orientation of a fucking kids' book. It's so Dungeonanddragony you could puke. In the great Scrabble match that is glibertarian blogging, those Jane Galt boys get the Triple Nerd Score.

But lo, in bitching out these bitches I have become the very thing I despise! So let me add to this post some political roughage -- and the trade doesn't get much rougher than General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. If there's one thing he hates worse then Frenchies (against whom he even sides with Muslim rioters -- or, as he usually calls them, "Allah's butchers"), it's the Demmy-crats. Some flecks of his latest spittle:

Forget about our dead soldiers, whose sacrifice is nothing but a political club for Democrats to wave in front of the media. After all, one way to create the kind of disaffection in the ranks that the Dems' leaders yearn to see is to tell our troops on the battlefield that they're risking their lives for nothing, we're throwing the game...

The General argues that the Democrats' antiwar shtick is nothing but treasonous vote-grubbing ("As long as the upcoming elections show Democratic gains, let the terrorist threat explode"). Were we dealing with a sane man, we might ask whether these "Democratic gains" are not signs that the average American voter is also turning treasonous, and if so, how many men the General will need to effect the obviously necessary military coup d'etat.

Oh, finally: Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, Welcome to the Monkey House, and many other deathless books; James Lileks collects matchbooks and Glenn Reynolds just sucks.

CALL ME SCHOOL BULLY, CLOTH-EARS! So James Piereson is saying how the money we contribute to our alma maters is all going to buy Ward Churchill a new pair of America-stomping boots, and then his assertions get still bolder:

...this explosion of money has been accompanied by a steady erosion in the quality of education, especially in the humanities. Many research organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the National Association of Scholars, have documented the elimination of the traditional core curriculum at most of our leading universities.

No supporting figures or studies are cited -- alas! I was really looking forward to reading proof-points like "today only 35% of Harvard graduates can find a decent job" and "90% of Classicists identify Homer as the husband of Marge Simpson." In fact I would have appreciated any sort evidence at all.

Since the only authority Piereson gives for his charges are the names of the organizations that back him up, I checked them out instead.

Media Transparency quotes the President of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, T. Kenneth Cribb, who says ISI's mission is "to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming." What sort of programming? Well, ISI publishes Rick Santorum's books, such as It Takes a Family; perhaps, comes the academic revolution, Senator Man-on-Dog can teach zoology.

Further glimpses of ISI's reading list are on view in its donors reports: can you guess what texts are found in "ISI’s Law Enforcement Library," which is "distributed to student groups, as well as criminal justice departments, to facilitate an understanding of, and thoughtful discussion about, the many challenges facing law enforcement officers today"? No, not Clockers, you anti-Western-Civilizationist! "The Library includes volumes such as: A Student’s Guide to the Study of Law by Gerard Bradley, The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk, and Are Cops Racist? by Heather MacDonald." Because if Manhattan Institute stalwarts like MacDonald aren't around to tell the kids at John Jay that cops aren't racist, the core cirriculum is dead.

Well, at least ISI's getting them to read -- a positive thing, as its VP of "Institutional Advancement" Jeff Cain tells us, "as [unnamed] study after [unnamed] study shows, the kids entering college today no longer read books." (Maybe it's time I got my doctorate! If I can do it without reading books, how hard can it be?) The ISI seems to be nerd-bait, using lofty notions of the academic calling to lure underserved prodigies unto the right-wing think-tank track. Well, as the pterodactyl/phonograph-slave said on The Flintstones, it's a living.

The National Association of Scholars, again per Media Transparency:

First gained notoriety in 1990 at the University of Texas, as Austin, where NAS faculty succeeded in blocking the inclusion in an English course of civil rights readings that had been proposed in response to increasing racial and sexual harassment on campus. During the controversy, the faculty group also encouraged a right-wing student group to lead an ultimately successful campaign to defund the unversity's Chicano newspaper.

With a record like that, who needs statistics? (Except the money-counting kind: the MAS gets beaucoup bucks from Scaife, Olin, and all the usual suspects.) Well, NAS does have a few numbers, or at least "declining" and "rising" number statements, regarding K-12 education. Their solution: No Child Left Behind! Making them the only "scholars" of any sort I've ever come across that are warm for it. (They also state that "there is no empirical reason to set a cap on [classroom] size." So quitcher bitchin', soccer mom, and help us punch ventilation holes in Johnny's new, SRO Chem lab!)

But, like all their type, NAS defines itself more by what they're against than what they're for. The air of constant edumacational crisis, requiring the immediate attention of pedagogical firemen supported by your tax-exempt dollars, is thick and heavy. At the online forum we are told that "Madison[, WI] is a Midwest center for drugs, binge drinking, recreational sex, homosexual pride, and abortion, and therefore it is a leftist favorite." (For bonus comedy points, the author portrays no awareness of student dissolution before our current age of homosexual pride; can't NAS afford prints of "The Rake's Progress"?)

What can one do about such outrages? Send money! And we in turn will send our foremost fist-shakers to state legislatures, where they will suggest a hostile takeover of college curricula by right-thinkin' Americans (or, as this particular speaker, Stephen Balch, hilariously puts it, the Legislature should "exercise due diligence in satisfying itself that the conditions under which [intellectual] autonomy has been granted are truly being observed." Well, someone l'arned him real good!)

I suppose if I looked harder and longer I might have found some solid proof that liberals destroyed our schools, but the more time you spend around these guys, the less you expect a straight answer.

TODAY'S PURGE:

"GRAND OLD SPENDERS" [Ramesh Ponnuru]
George Will is upset by social-conservative excess and by Republican overspending--e.g., the failure to reduce the growth of Medicaid even slightly. The excesses and the overspending are both worth criticizing. But it might be worth noting that the congressmen most likely to have supported the Medicaid restraint Will wanted were social conservatives. The Republican congressmen who would most heartily agree with Will about evolution, Terri Schiavo, etc., are the ones who would most likely disagree with him about Medicaid.

Posted at 01:29 PM

That's right, folks -- Ramesh Ponnuru finds George Fucking Will insufficiently loyal to the conservative cause.

I now believe National Review Online is a CIA black-bag op to discredit the American Right.

ECONOMICS PROVES GOD MEANT YOU TO BE GROUND UNDER MY HEEL. In the midst of this pro-forma OpinionJournal review of some new pop-economics book, we find these statements:

[The author] calls it an "uncomfortable state of affairs" that in a pure market system whoever pays the most gets to send his children to the best schools. Why is that uncomfortable? Somebody has to send his children to the best schools. Why shouldn't it be the people who pay the most? And he repeats the canard that when American workers are hurt by free-trade agreements a "civilized society" should support and retrain them -- without acknowledging that you can't be hurt by a free-trade agreement unless you're overpaid to begin with.

In context, of course, they are unremarkable, but I bet if you showed these passages to normal people, they might feel less than kindly disposed toward the glib asshole who wrote them. Even a capitalist (or a bystander to capitalism, such as myself) might think them unseemly, like a guy telling a friend who'd lost his job, "Tough shit, and don't expect any help from me -- you must have deserved it."

As the Delphi crisis shows, the entitlement mentality among corporate leaders has reached the status of depravity. I know several people working for a large corporation that just announced it would be downsizing "substantially" -- over a period of months. That means thousands of workers will, like concentration camp prisoners, busily dig graves while wondering whether, or when, the bullet will be fed into their own skulls and their bodies pushed in.

Normal people don't think or behave like this. I wonder why the Democrats don't do a better job of pointing this out?

THE TRUTH ABOUT LILEKS & REALITY. The very mention of 50 Cent's book deal* literally freezes Lileks in his tracks this morning; and after, I would guess, tense moments of wondering how to chastise this overambitious blackamoor without getting those P.C. creeps all up in his forehead, the author decides to smack down a foul-mouthed female instead -- while (I like to imagine) wearing a white, spaghetti-strapped t-shirt, with a baby screaming the background and the neighbors banging on the walls of his trailer, on the door of which is hung a piece of cardboard with the words "Jasper Wood" spelled out in colored macaroni. (Gnat made it for school afore she got knocked-ed up.)

"It’s the mainstreaming of shite jokes that annoys me," says Mr. Matchbook. Yet all his ideas for the employment of diarrhea in prop comedy are golden! That bit about Silverman throwing a pail of diarrhea in Jimmy Kimmel's face made me laugh. In fact, I shall bring it to mind for comfort in the grim days ahead.

* I find Mr. Cent's book deal amusing myself. We truly do have the culture we deserve! I note with interest that Cent name-checks Donald Goines, and it would be nice if his enterprise churned up another writer like that. But the relationship of Goines' art to 50 Cent's is roughly that of Edith Wharton to Liz Smith: that is to say, outside of milieu, none at all. For more comprehensive 50 Cent coverage, see Harry Hutton.

SAY IT, BITCH. SAY "YOU ARE THE KING OF CARTOONS." The internet, as any 300-pound Casanova or unpaid imagineer of Buffy-Willow sex scenes knows, is a place where dreams can come -- well, if not true, at least validated by like-minded others, which is often good enough.

So we shouldn't bedgrude Stephen Green his humiliation fantasy involving the mainstream media, though we should not mistake it for serious analysis, as many others have done.

Somberly addressing his audience of GI Joes, in the manner of Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye, Green calls out the "arm of decision" in each of the past Century's wars. In WWI the arm was manpower -- or, as he is pleased to call it, "chests... and I don't mean war chests... Young men by the millions put their wool-covered chests up against machine gun nests." (Whatever floats your boat, buddy.) Today in Iraq, says Green, it's the press that will either win the war for us -- or (and here we can almost see the color coming rapidly to his face) pay the price for losing it:

But I do mean to serve notice to the MSM.

When a nation loses a war, it looks to punish the people it believes are to blame. After Vietnam, neither Washington nor our Armed Forces were ever the same again3. But if we lose this Terror War, our media will be seen as largely to blame. They'll suffer blame for their ignorance and for their petulance. They'll suffer blame for seeing al Jazeera as comrades closer than the privates and NCOs and officers fighting to protect the First Amendment. They'll suffer blame for putting their hatred of a Republican President before their love of country. Whether that assessment is fair or not, it is how the public will see things.

Then the public would demand changes. And they'd probably get them, courtesy of a government looking for scapegoats, real or imagined. Should that day come, we'd lose our free press, and we'd lose our freedoms. We'd lose our country.

He says he's against this, but ah, mon chere, that look in your eyes never lies!

People think I'm a miserable cynic, and they're half right at least, but see, this chests-and-chastisement sort of nonsense is why I try not to give myself over to glorious visions of how things will be when the Good Guys win. It is good to keep in mind that, comes the revolution, rather than living together forever in harmony and bliss, everyone will probably have to change his underwear every half-hour, and wear it on the outside so Esposito can check. Thus you will be forearmed against the disappointment, shame, and (sometimes) danger of naivete.

Of course, when we finally do the old Saigon '74 shuffle in Iraq, and crowds of angry citizens fail to show up at the Time-Warner building with pitchforks and torches, guys like Green will have forgotten all about it, and be on to some other, equally ridiculous fantasy. But I assume you, dear readers, have more sense and longer memories than that.

IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT YOUR DEFINITION OF THE WORD "BULLSHIT" IS, PART 1,533. God knows I am not an optimist -- I never get caught up in wishful-thinking epidemics such as the great pony hunt -- but I can admit that, as Bush's numbers do a little ANWR drilling of their own, some of the major crooks and idiots of our time may in fact be headed for an ass-kicking.

How can I tell? First of all, Ole Perfesser Reynolds is circling his wagon. You know, for someone allegedly not in the Republican tank, the Perfesser is a pretty reliable source of White House spin in its times of crisis. This week he says the Administration is "thumping" the opposition (in the person of Ted Kennedy!), and the GOP's "pushback" against the Dems "seems to be a general effort, not a one-off" (the Cavalry is coming!). In between these All-Is-Well proclamations, the Perfesser soothes himself and his fellow bunker residents with classic rightwing thumbsuckers, from the Krauthammer Diagnosis (enemies of Bush are insane) to the Medved Maneuver (Hollywood hates our fighting men). When your stalking horses get skittish, you know things are bad.

Also, I see that the Republicans have started hauling out the old-timers to reinvigorate the troops (the typing sort of troops, we mean). Grandpa Podhoretz is not short of wind, alas, but in the course of his ramblings keeps falling back on sentences like this:

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD.

"Telling what he believed to be the truth"! One wonders what Podhoretz' idea of truth is -- plausible deniability, perhaps; he downplays Bush's WMD claims by quoting a few innocuous examples of Presidential jingo-jangle and then dismissing them, as if they carry the whole case. I don't think I've seen one of these guys mention this chilling bit from the 2003 State of the Union address:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

If he acknowledged it, Podhoretz would no doubt insist that no positive assertion was made herein, and his client should walk. No wonder the Perfesser is so animated; the Bush White House has reached the lawyerly stage of its decline. Maybe Bush can get Reynolds to negotiate the terms of his community service.

INTERNATIONAL VICTOR DAVIS HANSON THEATRE!

(Stage hung with flags of the world, some shot to pieces. In the eerie twilight, VDH squints dramatically at his own fist.)

VDH: First Europe turned on us... then Latin America...

(despite himself, his voice breaks and his hands fly to his face)

¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Mi vida, mi córazon!

(recovering himself with difficulty)

No, no diga arroz; diga, diga Vitarroz. Life calls and I go on.

(stoically)

I thought we could count on Antarctica at least -- but now it turns out that the penguins are gay. But never mind. It is time to move on. Behold our new best friends!

(Lights come up on three symbolic figures standing nervously against the cyclorama upstage.)

VDH: First, Vishnu -- loyal friend first of the British Raj, and now head of 20,000 subcontinental telephone operators whose employment helps "correct" wages in America. Then, Kazuo -- or, as we like to call him, Pete. He does not say much -- I speak no Japanese, and he knows only one English phrase, "Please give money" -- but is his not a friendly face? Finally, me Aussie friend, Blinky Bill Bollocks. Many's the night and morning we've spent around the barby, drinking tubes of Foster's and talking about the homosexuality of most of the world's nations.

(Stirring music)

VDH: Mark it well, friends: we didn't leave Europe, Latin America, and all together two-thirds of the world's population, and all of its penguins -- they left us. To them we say: Get a life!

(to the others)

VDH: Are you with me, fellows?

GUPTA: Mujhe Kucch Kehna Hai!

PETE: Please give money!

BLINKY BILL: Fuck off!

VDH: Excellent! We are the new Jamestown, and we will remake this soon-to-be-barren planet in our own image. Thank you, and good night!

(Stirring music climaxes, but cannot mask the sound of Blinky Bill strangling Pete and shouting "This is for World War Two, mate -- ye cut me father's balls off!)

FOREVER REMEMBER 11-10 or 11-9 DEPENDING ON YOUR TIME ZONE! Funny, I haven't seen bloggers saying We Are All Jordanians the way they were saying we were all Londoners and Madrileños and New Yorkers etc. a while back. I guess multiculturalism really is dead!

BESIDES, SINCE LIMBAUGH SLIMMED DOWN, I'VE BEEN STUCK WITH ALL THESE UNUSED FAT JOKES. I really didn't to talk about Jonah Goldberg again, but in the Olympics of Stupid he is having a Mark Spitz year and we must take notice. Get a pantload of this excerpt, in which he justifies torture by Americans:

...the detainees we are talking about are terrorists. That, as I understand it, is the point of the "Cheney carve out." Let's have a show of hands: Who thinks the US government should torture/abuse detainees who have no information to offer whatsoever?

The whole post is incredibly specious and I could worry it all day, but the passage I've quoted is so quintessentially Goldberg that, if we ever colonize other planets and one of them has a shortage of stupid, we could use these 42 words like sourdough starter to replenish it.

For one thing, Goldberg can only say "The detainees we are talking about are terrorists" because some highly unreliable people who happen to be agents of our Federal Government have called them that. We can't be sure of what they've actually done because these agents don't share such information with mere citizens.

The rest of it is a bizarre evasive maneuver meant to underscore one of Goldberg's themes: that we do torture for a reason, and if we have a reason it must be reasonable.

It is odd to that the archconservative Goldberg has apparently never considered that people do bad things when you give them too much power. If Jesus and the saints in heaven came down and took over the Government, given the latitude for torture and secret/indefinite detentions Goldberg approves, they would within weeks be asking Winston Smith "How many fingers?"

Now imagine a nest of ratfucks like ones we've got holding those powers.

Sometimes stupidity descends to the level of criminal negligence.

SOCIAL PROBLEM. I was trawling Protein Wisdom's comments (Why do men go to zoos?) and came across this classic These-Liberal-Friends-of-Mine post:

To my chagrin, I have friends and family members who think this way. Narcicists all? Probably. They’re capable of massive self-deception to protect their fragile, bloated egos. Public and foreign policy are judged overwhelmingly on outward appearances and presumed good or bad intentions. All would probably name their primary flaw to be that they just care too much.

Unfortunately, their only real care is reaffirming to themselves and others their own moral superiority. This tends to reveal itself in overwhelmingly ostentatious displays of humility. I think this is related to the apparent self-hatred that leads them to “blame America first” and preface all judgments with indictments of American flaws. It’s not really self-hatred, so much as a self-conscious desire to appear to debase themselves and their culture in order to make themselves look and feel morally righteous.

Debasing ourselves and America just to get our righteousness buzz! We must pretty fucking sick...

...which brings up an old question of mine: given that conservatives sure do love to talk about how stupid and evil their Liberal Friends are, why are they their friends?

It's not like guys like this are laughing off some annoying habit such as public nose-picking or inappropriate bursts of song. They describe their "friends" as basket cases and as enemies of freedom. They obvious hold them in complete contempt. Doesn't that stretch to breaking the definition of friendship?

Maybe we need a new word: "strawfriend." ("I was hanging out with my liberal strawfriend and he kept insisting that Bush was Hitler. Then he did a little pathetic dance and shit his pants.")

Or maybe the sex is too good. I dunno, what do you guys think?

(For the record, I love, love, love all my deranged right-wing friends!)

CLUCKS. Jonah Goldberg has been writing a book, in the course of which exercise he apparently learned the names John Dewey, Charles Peirce, and William James, which he now uses to ornament his usual bullshit. Confronted by Louis Menand's clever parable of Peircean pragmatism ("The chicken that makes a special cluck every time it pushes the lever and opens the door may 'believe' the cluck is an indispensable element in the sequence of actions producing the desired outcome, but to the human observer the cluck is meaningless and belief in its efficacy is a superstition"), Goldberg unwisely tries to turn the tables to his advantage, but winds up spilling gravy on his pants:

Not every notion is a useless appendix even if it looks like one at first, particularly to an atheistic sophisticate with no time for concepts of the supernatural. And while the chicken may be stupid to believe his clucking causes the door to open, human beings are more complex and what may appear to be mere clucks may in fact be very important and useful organizing principles or symbolic concepts that hold civilization together.

It takes a special kind of ineptitude to defend tradition and ritual by pointing out their resemblance to chicken squawks.

But I can see why Goldberg was attracted to this unfortunate metaphor. As fans of his lumpy prose can attest, Goldberg himself clucks quite loudly and frequently during intellectual endeavors, never more so than when he is clearly full of shit, and seems to think this clucking holds said shit together.

For example, in this 2004 defense of our bogus Iraq policy, Goldberg starts, as one might expect him to do in physical combat, with an unconvincing feint ("On this I agree with the Bush bashers: I don't think it's true that we're safer today"). You might expect him to get around to a point eventually, in which case you would be disappointed. We are not safer, because we were not expected to be safer -- "First of all, since when are we supposed to be 'safer' according to the timetables of the presidential-election cycle? I mean seriously, how is that supposed to work?" But going to war not only was a great idea -- it's still a great idea, notwithstanding that it hasn't achieved anything ("So do you fix the problem at the source or do you use our tallest buildings, greatest monuments, and most populated cities as bug-zappers for jihadists. I say: Go to the source").

Goldberg thereafter strews specious stubs of arguments and wretchedly inapposite and unsuccessful similes ("so many 'international community' aristocrats that if they all got together for a group photo they'd look like a re-staging of the Sgt. Pepper's album cover with better suits"), and then vanishes in a cloud of fart.

Despite all the recent yapping about a bold conservative intellectual tradition, these are the worst times ever for conservative commentators (as far as quality goes, anyway; financially I'm sure things are great). The crooks and imbeciles these commentators wished into office are daily getting away with incredible fraud, incompetence and deception, yet answer any objection with the rhetorical equivalent of So What, because they know they can get away with it (talk about a Pragmatic "razor"!). In this environment, Goldberg and his fellows know, there is no reason to sweat out a line of reasoning when you can just do the hokey-pokey, turn yourself around, and defiantly finish, "That's what it's all about" -- or an alternate version such as Goldberg's today: "Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest. Now, it's time for a sandwich."

MAD STAN. The blogosphere's like a big video game where we assail each other with epithets instead of tojo blades. Over time, the insults lose much of their meaning. Now when wingers call us "traitors," it's sort of like "good morning" -- a pro-forma greeting.

But when I say Stanley Kurtz is nuts, I don't mean oh, that scalawag, he's incorrigible, or even I hate the bastard and this is the best insult I can think of because I'm drunk, I mean THIS IS ONE NON-COMPOS-MENTIS MOTHERFUCKER!

I really think some of his proposals reflect, at the very least, a depraved indifference to human life. His plan to save Western Civilization by destroying the economy is a case in point. At least his cohorts try to make-believe their lunatic plans will not lead to widespread misery -- which evasiveness shows they still have some awareness of a world outside themselves; they are thus sane, if not smart or likable. But Kurtz' plan was frankly sociopathic and he presented it as if it were a bouquet of roses for the homecoming queen.

Since then, whenever Kurtz has come down the block muttering about, say, how Hollywood is deliberately sacrificing profits to "make the culture more liberal," I have given him a wide berth. Now he seems to be in the tertiary stages of his affliction.

Check out his reaction to the "College Not Combat" measure that passed in San Francisco last night. The measure prohibits military recruiters in high schools. It's the sort of thing one expects of the left coast and, when the world is in balance, we may also expect conservatives to wag their fingers at it briefly, then move swiftly on to the next outrage. Why, it doesn't even directly involve homosexuals!

But Kurtz, exuding the dank smell of a man who has been up all night rehearsing before a mirror ("Listen you fucker, you screwheads, you... listen you fuckers, you screwheads..."), gives us this:

...the symbolic statement is not at all trivial, and it needs to be met with an equally powerful symbolic response.

I think congress ought to consider a resolution of censure. We also ought to get comments on this from congressmen and senators from California, not to mention the mayor of San Francisco and the Governor. Our public officials need to sharply repudiate this decision. We need to know whether they are with the United States, or with the voters of San Francisco. At this point, these are beginning to seem like separate entities. But clear statements of repudiation by public figures could help to reassure the country that San Franciscans remain loyal to the United States. Also, following publicity and national discussion, the city should take another vote on this question. It is to be hoped that with more attention and a larger turnout, the voters of San Francisco will themselves repudiate this ill advised measure, thereby re-associating themselves with the United States of America.

Demands for an investigation of everyone powerful. Blanket accusations of disloyalty. Finally, fantasies of vengeance. Listen you fuckers, you screwheads -- here is a man who would not take any more!

K-Lo, Jonah -- run, Kurtz has lost it! He may even come in to work one day with a loaded weapon, and... um, never mind.

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN -- IN THEIR CUSTOMARY GIBBERISH! Well, I don't see how we lost*, but Richie Rich is mayor again. Get ready for the Waterside Plaza Stadium! I hate the son of a bitch, but whattaya gonna do: $75 million in campaign spending cuts an awful lot of family ties.

I was a little surprised by the persistence of acrimony in victory of Jersey Governor-elect Corzine. He didn't seem to have much good to say about Forrester, referring to his opponent's personal attacks on him as if his own campaign hadn't lustily indulged in such attacks. (I will always remember the Corzine ads with a shifty-eyed Forrester standing next to George Bush -- a cropped version of which emphasized the proximity of Forrester's head to the Presidential seal, with a headline beginning "The final days...")

Bloomberg, of course, was nicer; noblesse oblige and all. (The later these people make their money, the shittier they behave.) Bloomberg's mantra of "open for business... back in business" is of course the roadmap for the City's future: Let's make a deal! You give us a couple hundred union jobs, we'll give you whatever prime real estate we have left -- even if people are still living on it. We'll see how this works, God help us.

The referenda results are coming in more slowly. NY1 has preliminary figures for all but Prop 1 -- wonder what the holdup is there? I voted Yes on 1 and 2 because the New York Post opposed them, and because I had no pen -- not that there was a write-in slot, but these plebescites make we want to talk back. (For Prop 3, having to do with a judicial ethics code, I voted No -- we rejected it in 2003, who needs it, what difference will it make -- but wanted to stipulate that I would be open to such a code if it included a provision whereby violators got an ass-bare spanking in Macy's window at high noon. I mean, where's the accountability?)

In other developments, subway gunman Bernie Goetz, at this writing, has about 4,500 votes for Public Advocate. (Betsy Gotbaum has about 185,000 and a lock on the office, for all the good it will do her.) I voted for Gotbaum, having no reasonable alternative (and no pen with which to write in Al Sharpton), but I feel more kinship with the Goetz voters. I felt a pang of affinity too for the candidate running on the Rents Are Too Damn High ticket. But, you know, habits die hard, and I expect to work within the system a while longer, at least until gasoline gets cheap enough for me to fill a few beer bottles with it.

Out in the flyover, I see a late Bush visit didn't help Virginia's Jerry Kilgore, but alternative reality fans need not despair: In a smaller but more significant vote, the Kansas Board of Education went for the Jesus slate of science standards, which "change the definition of science to allow for non-natural explanations." In 2006, expect Woman to be official designated Weaker Vessel in several state legislatures.

We're still waiting on Cali's batch-o'-referenda, which results I expect will be eminently spinnable no matter what.

And, oh yeah, "In Texas, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage was being overwhelmingly approved." Can't wait for the "King of the Hill" episode about that!

The bottom line is the country's fucked, but with its democratic processes intact! Celebrate with your mass-marketed intoxicant of choice, and pray for divine intervention!

* This is a joke. Don't Pauline Kael me. Oh, go ahead. At least the guy in the link understood Kael was probably kidding.

UPDATE. To think, I didn't first consult the National Review apparatchiks! Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas is dragged in for doublethinktank spin on City elections; after Old Dominion disappointment, K-Y looks for silver linings in Jersey; and some of the brethren are glued to parental-notification coverage for signs that, though their leaders are displeasing, sex-hatred trumps all. Jonah Goldberg retains his "squared" relationship to the general idiocy.

SURCEASE. I'm sick of current events -- war, Congressional hearings, riots, elections, and now this. Maybe MLB needs a dress code!

If you feel the same way (about current events, not the dress code), I recommend to you the works of Ivor Cutler, which for whole minutes at a time can make reality seem quite irrelevant.

If you just can't help yourself, you might explain to me what's going on in France. God knows there's plenty of Clash of Civilizations spin; maybe I haven't watched enough of the Lord of the Rings movies, but this sounds more likely to me. (Ralph "Blood & Guts" Peters' reaction is, as one might expect, so deranged not even John Derbyshire can endorse it.)

SERENDIPITY -- sometimes you hit a nice patch of it. I was surfing the barrel of crackpot sites and came across this post about Christian fantasy movies, and it gave me two hits of bliss: first, a press release revealing that "Hyde Park Entertainment and Vincent Newman Entertainment are producing a [film] version of 'Paradise Lost,' the epic poem about Lucifer's fall composed by John Milton" (let Malkovitch and Willem Dafoe duke it out for the lead, I say); and this from the comments:

I am inspired to write a screenplay based on the life and times of Rescue Rick the Grass Cut Man. It is based on a real-life story, including faith-based experiences. I am not sure how the movie will end at this point.

Rescue Rick the Grass Cut Man
http://www.rescuerick.com

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

MUSTA BEEN DURING THAT PARTY IN HYANNISPORT -- WE WERE ALL PRETTY WASTED. Ann Althouse, ladies and gentlemen:

As I listen to the attacks on Judge Alito, I hear, relentlessly expressed, the idea that law is political and judges are all ideologues who, given power, will work their will on us. Where are the passionate, Brennanesque liberals of yore, who really believed we have rights? Is that belief becoming solely a conservative notion?

Look, I sent out change of address forms, so when a massive change like liberals not believing "we have rights" goes through, I should be getting notices.

UPDATE. She teaches law? Jesus fucking Christ. Well, this sort of thing is not unprecendented.

UPDATE II. Professor Althouse says that my "wisecrack" reveals that I "know nothing about Legal Realism, Critical Legal Studies, and ordinary left-wing political talk about law." Once again I commit the error of responding to what the Professor said as opposed to what she meant.

Even if we concede that some liberals seem to agitate for results-based judicial appointments, it does not follow that liberals cease to believe in rights, and that rights have become the exclusive concern of conservatives.

Law's her thing, language mine. Both, I understand, are exacting disciplines. But if you don't get a handle on the latter you can't always expect others to understand you, however highly you regard your own expertise.

KULTURE KORPS KOMEDY FUNTIME! Tbogg notices that the Kultur Kops of Libertas are reviewing films they haven't seen. Hey, I've been all over Libertas like a dog on vomit -- or a pre-teen on edible body frosting -- for months!

I notice that the Libertasians still review movies by their trailers, too ("We spend a lot of time in the trailer with Erica Bana looking soulfully off-camera, wondering whether he’s losing his humanity -- and where are the terrorists in all this?"). Somebody tell them that, when Craig Kilborn used to review movie posters, that was supposed to be funny.

Not being in the business of reviewing films I haven't seen, I will trust the authority of OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger, who actually took in Capote (what a shock -- I thought those OpinionJournal guys spent every weekend at hoedowns and hayrides with the Real People) and tells us this:

Up to this point, Truman Capote has been the perfect emissary from the land of the blue--a person who all at the same time can be ironic, morally fine-tuned, witty, empathetic, detached, and the brightest person in Holcomb wearing a scarf "from Bergdorf's." But inside Perry Smith's cell, Truman Capote suddenly passes to another place. He is staring into the face of evil, and after all these years, after all the articulate empathy, he knows it. Call it a Red state moment.

I always thought the states that went for Bush were defined by their psychopathic killers, and now a prominent conservative has confirmed it.

Bonus comedy: "Again, against the grain of current Hollywood practice, this movie takes no sides and, even more admirably, condescends to no one in Kansas." I can see the studio execs now, lounging in their hot tubs of fetal cord blood, watching the Capote rushes and yelling, "Wait a minute -- where are the Kansas jokes? Where's the rube from Topeka asking the urban-ethnic hero to help him get his thumb out of his own ass? That's what pushed My Best Friend's Wedding over the top!"

(PS to Henninger: Capote spent the highly formative first 10 years of his life in the deep South, and he retained some of that Southern flavor in both his speech and in his writing ever after. This actually makes him a very good exemplar of "the land of the blue," but probably not in the way that you think.)

EVEN MORE FUN in Henninger's comments section. Consensus: where we traitors see "diversity," patriots see "evil." And "New Jersey standards," by which I believe the fellow means something like this.

SHORTER STANLEY KURTZ: Good news, fellas -- I found another guy who uses big words and hates fags!

GOLDBERG'S GALILEO. Weary of mau-mauing the flak catchers*, I went to the Corner to watch Jonah Goldberg put Oreos to their right use -- that is, stuffing as many as he can into his mouth -- but, to my chagrin, he was writing:

Derb - Must we revisit Galileo again? It was the scientists as much as anyone who really screwed him. I'm not saying the Church was blameless, but Galileo's scientific colleagues were back-stabbers while the Church bent over backwards to cut the guy some slack.

Having run out of current events to misrepresent, Goldberg reaches into the mists of time! Actually he's done this routine before, in a 1999 article obviously influenced by, if not cribbed from, the Catholic Encyclopedia Galileo entry. In the earlier article, Goldberg throws in a bunch of crypto-jokes ("the Church didn’t stop the publication or the debate, let alone sew a starving squirrel to Galileo’s pancreas") to distract from the essential idiocy of the premise; the non-cryptohumorous parts actually underline the essential idiocy of the premise ("The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway").

Nowadays, of course, Goldberg, seasoned by years of bloggery, simply emits such absurdities like wet farts and runs out the door. But the idea that the all-powerful institution that threatened and indefinitely detained Galileo, and forced him to publicly deny physical fact, is less culpable than a couple of jealous scientists is an intriguing one for an alleged conservative. Let us imagine Goldberg's Life of Galileo:

(POPE URBAN and GALILEO sit with their arms around each other, the theme from The Godfather playing in the background)

POPE URBAN: Look, Gally, ya gotta understand -- I don't wanna do this thing, but if ya keep tellin' people the earth revolves aroun' da sun, I'm gonna hafta wack ya -- the slow way. (Makes a wringing gesture.) Get me?

GALILEO: I understand, Don Urbano. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. It's those bastards who ratted me out I can't forgive!

POPE URBAN: Okay, just sign the papers, then come over my house. My wife's making braciole.

GALILEO: I can't come over your house, ya mook! I'm under house arrest!

(Much laughter, curtain falls.)

If nothing else, taking blame off the Church seems like moral relativism, and that's still a bad thing with these guys, right?

*... but not too weary to point out this choice bit from the denunciation of me at Protein Wisdom:

Why is acceptable (or at least not racist) for a black man to call a white redneck, or cracker, or honkey, but it’s not acceptable for a white man to use nigger or other racial insults towards blacks?

If nothing else, I've raised their level of debate!

TREADWELL, THE WRATH OF GOD. Finally got to see Grizzly Man. I used to be a big Herzogkopf, but I hadn't seen a Herzog movie since My Best Fiend (and before that, God's Angry Man). Now I want to go back and make up for lost time. Does Netflix stock his stuff?

Grizzly Man is awfully funny in the classic Herzog manner -- that is, it's often hard to tell whether he means the scenes to be funny or not, but they work whether you laugh or not. What's funny about Treadwell, the doomed ursophile, as he gibbers among his beloved killer beasts, is also what's terrible about him -- and Herzog is very clever about stringing out the details of Treadwell's inner life so that we perceive him as a clown reacting blissfully to nature long before we are encouraged to see him as a pathological case playing a mad game with death.

Other Herzog films kept coming to me as I watched. Treadwell might have been an amusing vignette in Fata Morgana; maybe some of the folks in Fata Morgana might have been Treadwells. The odd locals reminded me of the Americans in Stroszek, reacting uncomprehendingly to another incarnation of Bruno S. And Herzog goes out of his way to remind us of Klaus Kinski, and the agonized heroes Kinski played for him, when Treadwell curses out the Park Police and just about everyone else.

It's more me than the film, perhaps, but I thought that Grizzly Man was in part about loneliness. Treadwell's girlfriend manned the camera for him, but in the film at least that's all she is: a camera. When Herzog brings up the fictitiousness of Treadwell's solitude in the wilderness, he shows Treadwell insisting on it -- "Here I am, all alone" -- and he is still very convincing. His monologues have a Robinson Crusoe (via Buñuel) quality of desperate self-justification. Treadwell's history reveals many people who loved him, and suggests his inability to really love them back. (His friend's laconic reaction to the deceptions Treadwell practiced on him are in a way more chilling than the rage or hurt one might expect.) His professions of love to the beasts reminded me of Crusoe's greeting to the ants in the Buñuel version.

Various people in the film refer to Treadwell's death as a "tragedy"; others say he had it coming. Both may be right. We tend to talk about every untoward death as a tragedy, but this one, taken as an artistic construct, has the elements of tragedy -- hubris, hamartia, all that. I thought of Yeats' Cuchulain: the waves have mastered him.

(fixed reference to Arizona in Stroszek -- I was obviously thinking of those wistful shots of Bruno with "By The Time I Get to Phoenix" playing in the background)

BREAK TIME. I'm tired of harshing on fools, let me share this epiphanette: I was thinking of The Cask of Amontillado, and on a whim tried the URL "montressor.com." I got this. I'm sure Ms. Montressor is a wonderful tour director, but I wonder if she does wineries.

UPDATE. Not that's there's really a theme, but let's call this a belated Halloween post and include this terrific story about Bela Lugosi.

SNAPPY ANSWERS TO STUPID QUESTIONS. Jesus fuck. Rosa Parks' mourners talk about civil rights at her funeral, and the National Review folks try to revive the Wellstone Maneuver.

And why does the Left get to claim Rosa Parks? Brave American. Inspiring American. Does she need to become a liberal icon? Condi Rice is the walking legacy of Rosa Parks blah blah blah... -- K. J. Lopez.

Maybe, "K-Lo," it's because back when Rosa Parks and her colleagues were getting arrested, attacked by police dogs, murdered, etc., the magazine for whom you work took this position on their struggle:

The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct... It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

Written in 1957, BTW, so the NatRev guys weren't talking about rap music -- yet.

(Boy, how about that Walter Duranty, huh?)

UPDATE. A very interesting article about overt racists in "mainstream" conservative media here.

HOW COME THEY CAN CALL EACH OTHER 'NIGGER' AND WE CAN'T? A bunch of wingers are mad because some black people made fun of some black people. Why, one black person even portrayed another black person as Sambo! This indignity causes the wingers to say stuff like this:

Therefore, it follows that a move away from the Democratic party is tantamount to a move away from black authenticity, a willful act that opens to attack those “race traitors” who have surrendered the protections that proceed from adherence to the dictates of the group’s identity. Which is to say, racial jabs are okay when they are aimed at those who’ve surrendered the protections offered by the group, because those who’ve left the group no longer meet the requirements for protected blackness.

This same guy likes to complain about "a culture of political correctness constantly on guard against giving offense," but when black people throw Oreos, it's time to regulate!

And... oh, I give up. This is like trying to develop an argument against people who think peppermints are made out of peppers and mints. If you don't see the difference between Caucasians doing these things to African-Americans, and AfAms doing them to other AfAms, then I can only suggest a remedial class in Life Itself.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein responds, says it's time to add me a list of people (out of a quote from Salman Rushdie) who believe "that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill." And check out who I'm aiding and abetting (or maybe we're peers -- it's hard to tell): "Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini." Seems like a stretch to me, but what do I know, I'm depraved. (Fixed for clarity.)

COMRADES! IS MAKING (AND TAKING) DOUBLE-PLUS-GOODFILMS FOR GLORIOUS REVOLUTION! Tbogg points out the latest "I claim this cool thing for conservatism" article, this one by Brian C. Anderson, who predicts a right-wing takeover in Hollywood because all his favorite movies promote the Republican agenda. Like Cast Away.

You didn't know Cast Away was right-wing? Anderson explains:

The movie makes us keenly aware of the benefits -- the immense human achievement -- of an advanced capitalist society. (Untypical for Hollywood, Cast Away depicts a big corporation as a caring and effective organization: when Noland returns after his rescue, FedEx takes him in like a long-lost family member.)

Whereas goddamned liberals want us to rot on desert islands.

There's plenty such nuttiness to enjoy there, but may I play killjoy a moment and point out what's really wrong with stuff like this?

It's the presumption that there is no such thing as art -- merely better or worse propaganda. Anderson closes:

If [conservatives] can create a popular cinema that artistically reflects a right-of-center worldview -- rather than crudely imposes it -- it would be a huge advance for the Right in America’s ongoing cultural struggles. After all, it’s not just reason and analysis that will decide the outcome of those struggles. The imagination and the heart -- the Dream Factory’s stock-in-trade -- will play at least as large a part.

That bit about "ongoing cultural struggles" in which the imagination and the heart "play a part" sounds like Stalin running a filmmakers' boot-camp.

Anderson's fellow numbskull Michael Medved asserts that artists make "dark, hard-hitting, critically acclaimed material" in order to get laid. He is of course half right. But he's half-wrong, too, and that's the important part. There are easier ways to get laid than making art. There are easier ways of getting anything than making art. Yet some people continue to do it.

Doesn't it seem as if Anderson could never even imagine a person making a work of art out of pure love of craft? When he looks at paintings, movies, novels, etc., a little meter in his head calibrates each cultural artifact's relative usefulness in the Struggle.

Culture War, these days, apparently means war on culture.

BUT ARE WE JUST THE GUYS TO DO IT? Just saw the second and final debate between Bloomberg and Ferrer. Neither combatant was very good, which of course hurts Ferrer more. The challenger contented himself with jabbing at Bloomberg -- a typical loser's gambit -- for specific shortcomings without pulling them together into a case. After hearing the Mayor continually offload onto the Governor and State Legislature all blame for the lack of action at Ground Zero, the crappy state of the subways, and the inability to get commuters and wealthy citizens to pay a fairer share of taxes, a more enterprising opponent might have more strongly suggested it were curious that the great deal-maker Bloomberg had been so bad at making deals to the City's benefit.

A good answer to that might be that, if Bloomberg couldn't swing these things, why would Ferrer? I have to admit I don't see Mayor Ferrer striking terror in the heart of the entrenched interests. The only difference I would expect is that he would actually try. As the boys in Animal House knew, there does come a time when the situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

For years the City has been giving away leases and contracts to powerful interests in hopes of generating enough jobs to keep things peaceable. Donald Trump pays less rent on the Grand Hyatt than I do on my railroad flat in Greenpoint. This creates some jobs, but also increases the distance between those who own the town and those who work in it.

We drones trudge wearily into Manhattan each morning from the far corners of the boroughs, and wearily back again. To get far enough away from us to make their dollars seem worth the effort, the managerial classes are removing farther and farther away: to south Jersey, upstate New York, Pennsylvania. Greater New York is beginning to look like a massive version of Manchester in Friedrich Engels' time, as described by Edmund Wilson: "...its commercial section surrounded by a girdle of working-class sections, and, outside the working-class girdle, the villas and gardens of the owners merging pleasantly with the country around... the owners had arranged it so it was possible for them to travel back and forth between the Exchange and their homes without ever being obliged to take cognizance of the condition of the working-class quarters..."

My equanimous soul is not much bothered that the slum districts of my youth are now shopping bazaars and playgrounds for the moneyed -- I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space. But it strikes me that as the poor get pushed further out from the center, we are replacing one sort of tension -- the sometimes dangerous but often fruitful tension that comes when the well-off and the not-so-well-off are cossetted together -- with another.

As the distance in New York between the rich and poor becomes more a physical one, we come to resemble other cities where one can go to do one's work without ever meeting anyone whose experiences are significantly different from one's own. You might scrape a plate, you might have your plate scraped; the world on the other side of the plate remains a mystery to you.

You could go from your college to your penthouse without any awareness of the teeming world without which your life would be impossible.

Have you ever wondered how New Yorkers got so damned liberal? It's not because we all read Marx -- many of us don't read at all. It's because for years the rich and the poor lived all bunched up together here. There was no escaping the awareness of other ways of life, and whatever your station (outside the richest precincts), you probably had a neighbor much worse off that you.

I remember, years ago, eating at the Kiev on Second Avenue with my then-girlfriend. The Kiev then was so cheap that everyone could eat there; a lot of indigents without stoves took small meals there. A little ragged woman sitting next to us had finished her portion of food and, with great trepidation, asked my girlfriend if she could have some of her fries. It obviously took a lot for her to ask. My girlfriend declined; we weren't rolling in dough, either. The woman tapped her fingertips to her own mouth a moment; something was at war inside her. Then, with a little cry, she reached over and grabbed a fistful of fries. A waiter hurriedly escorted her out.

This woman was not a welfare queen.

You don't forget things like that.

From Jacob Riis to Jim Carroll, great souls have thrived on the porous social fabric of New York, and it has given them heart and substance to in turn give to the rest of the world. When you think of New York's glories, the things that made it great rather than merely colossal, what do you think of? Do you think of James Baldwin, Jane Jacobs, Bernard Malamud, Leonard Bernstein, Jackie Robinson, Allen Ginsburg, Lou Reed, Grandmaster Flash? Or do you think of Trump Tower?

At the close of the debate, Ferrer referred to the bridge he had figuratively crossed to get from Fox Street in the South Bronx to the Democratic Mayoral nomination, and said he hoped he could help others to cross it. It was campaign boilerplate, but it gave me nonetheless a little pang. The whole idea of figurative bridges is very old-fashioned and perhaps silly, but for a moment, a shoddily poetic, ward-heeling New York political moment, I was moved. Because that bridge is real, and the chasm it spans is real, and for many years our City has been about leading people to the other side.

Bloomberg radiated contempt for Ferrer and the whole idea that he should be made to justify his ways in a TV studio not his own.

God, I hate that fucking pasty-faced rich prick.

The situation in the short and perhaps medium term is hopeless. Neither Ferrer's nor Bloomberg's "affordable housing" schemes are going to make a serious dent in things. The blackjack table at which Bloomberg folded his hand on the West Side Stadium deal, and keeps gamely tossing chips for the Ratner Atlantic Yards project, will remain where the action is, has a limited number of seats, and has not appreciably changed its tipping policy in quite some time.

Hapless as he is, I owe Ferrer a vote because he stood up to Giuliani when that creep wanted to postpone the 2001 election, a bit of useless Caesarism that he otherwise would have pulled off. Other than that, mine's a no vote -- no to City governance as corporate governance, and to the idea that we are merely employees in a giant conglomerate with a shitty benefits package and a glossy annual report.

I know not what course others may take -- well, I do know. It doesn't matter. It may be that in 2009 I'll be sitting in Far Rockaway, trying to finish my election essay in time to get a few hours sleep so I can catch a train at dawn. Never mind. I've seen it go from bad to worse, and I'll see this thing through to the end. I'll be here when Bloomberg has fucked off to whatever tropical island he'll reward himself with when this piece of his resume is completed. Perhaps that will be victory enough.

REPUBLICANS WITH WEED. Looks like SCOTUS nominee Alito has the support of everyone who matters: Not only are the fetus fans of the Religious Right suspiciously confident he'll see things their way, but the Judge is getting mad props from the glibertarians. We previously noted the approval of the corporate individualists at the American Enterprise Institute, and at Reason's Hit & Run, Julian Sanchez offers a lengthy defense of Alito, including this lovely passage:

If some employer decides it doesn't want to hire people named Sanchez, I think it ought to be able to legally -- though I'd hope for it to be swiftly punished by public opinion.

In the coming glibertarian paradise, Comrade Sanchez might just get a chance to find out.

What do these guys believe in again?