PULL QUOTE OF THE SUMMER! "But if you want to laugh, can handle some cringing, and don’t want to completely leave behind the reality of war in the holiest of lands, Zohan is fresh, fearless, and fun." -- Kathryn J. Lopez, National Review.

She's no David Manning, but K-Lo might fill some seats in Georgetown. In the Gene Siskel chair, Debbie Schlussel finds Don't Mess With the Zohan "yet another peacenik, moral equivalency movie... with anti-Israel, anti-Semitic stereotypes, and bad, vulgar, disgusting jokes." If you find it strange that the author of "The Hannukah Song" would make such a thing, you should understand that Schlussel doesn't seem to grasp the Adam Sandler working method:

Instead of being funny and exploring the contradictions of Islamic terrorists who won't make peace and would rather send their own children to their deaths, we're given a steady supply of very graphic penis jokes...

Actually that would make a more effective pull quote than Lopez'. And some others we could pull...

You know the depraved, slutty life that Bin Laden likes to say America is living? That's this movie...

... no less nudity and frank talk than the deservedly R-rated "Sex and the City"...

Our real enemy is not each other, goes the Sandler didactic. It's Whitey and corporate America...

...this movie does to Israel and the Jews what Bin Laden, Hezbollah, and HAMAS could not...

This movie is high quality Bin Laden Cinema.

...might help with the crucial global market. In fact, they have already increased my desire to see Zohan by a factor of .01. And I thought that was impossible.

Next week: The self-loathing Judaism of Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

NO GUARDRAILS EDITORS. The Wall Street Journal has engaged an Australian to do a demography-is-destiny essay from a Downunder perspective. Australia is lacking males, he says, citing a 98/100 m-to-f ratio versus China's manly 107/100. (Oddly, he neither cites nor proposes the Chinese solution of gender-specific abortions.)

In case readers are wondering why this small shortfall in boomerang-toting, Fosters-swilling Aussie blokes should be of concern to them, the author quotes "one of Australia's leading demographers," who says the "man drought" will have "serious repercussions." Later he bestirs himself to explain further:

Note that the man shortage becomes more pronounced just at the age when people tend to start thinking seriously about marriage and childrearing. But if you are a woman looking for a husband in this age group, chances are the only thing you are being squeezed by are the numbers. The shortage of men in this critical age group is thought to be contributing to Australia's low fertility rates.

So that's how he sold this! Marriage is a big deal for Journal scolds, usually as something to be defended against homosexuals, and sometimes as something to be enforced among black people. But here the issue seems to be a paucity of babies -- and Aussie babies at that, which are expected to be whiter than the kind Journal writers do not endorse.

But even here the author fails. As we have previously pointed out, Australian fertility has been accelerating and is now at a ten-year high. This is widely attributed to the "baby bonus" offered by the Australian Government. If the numbers are not quite what the author and the Journal would like, the solution is obvious: more breeder welfare!

I know these are hard times for conservatives, but you'd think the Journal could have at least queried this one a little more thoroughly. Of course the temptation to let it ride must have been great, especially with such surefire material as this:

Yes, we are the country that produced the likes of Hugh Jackman and Errol Flynn, but male migrants who might once have been intimidated by our raw masculinity can take comfort in our budding new-age sensitivities. In a survey released last month it was found that only 5% of Australian men regularly play a game of football, 50% do not lift the bonnet of their car and shed ownership has dropped by a staggering 27%. Moisturizer sales have gone through the roof.

The high-jump bar is high, but to the men of Japan, China, India, Korea, Thailand and beyond, the land of opportunity (and females) is here. Come for the beaches, but stay for the women.

Numbers may not favor the fertility angle, but the suggestion that Australian men are so emasculated -- especially under a Labor Administration -- that studs must be flown in from Thailand must have been too exciting for the Journal to pass up.

I am seriously thinking of employing a pseudonym and selling the Journal a piece about the low replacement rate among Williamsburg hipsters, inviting bow-legged farmboys from the hinterlands to have at the womenfolk. I could use the money, and if it catches on, real estate values in that neighborhood may be so drastically affected that I will be able to move back into my old apartment.

UPDATE. Fixed spelling error. Thanks to all my correctors.

BREAKING! MUST CREDIT ALICUBLOG! Norbizness seems to have resumed posting. Don't let this get around.

UPDATE. The virus appears to have spread. Check back in a month.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT. I see at the City Journal Andrew Klavan is calling for conservatives to reverse the noxious tide of our "culture" by getting into the arts racket:

Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.

I never tire of hearing this kind of thing, and am pleased to see Klavan, an accomplished writer, has gone beyond demanding Hollywood make his conservative art for him, and started to ask his fellow travelers to put their backs into it. The Liberty Film Festival site Libertas, which has long been on the right side of this issue (if of little else), responds affirmatively:

While conservatives won elections the last thirty-years, the left infested schools, universities, the entertainment industry, news media, and publishing. They understand politics follows the culture, not the other way around. Conservatives have done well grabbing back a piece of publishing and the news media, but have a long way to go with entertainment and educational institutions.

Of course there is a problem, and keen readers will have picked it up already: though these conservatives recognize the power is in their own hands, they still obsess on the blame they find in liberals for their (or the culture's) problems. In this way, to paraphrase Raging Bull, they defeat their own purpose.

It's odd, really. They went mad for the popular Knocked Up -- which I enjoyed myself -- but fail to notice that, first, that culture is a two-way street -- you can gain entree to the cineplexes faster with dick jokes than with propaganda -- and, second, that while the urge to remake the world is often a spur to artistry (especially among the young), it's not all that's needed.

That's also odd because we live in the age of indie. You can make music and movies on your laptop; you can publish your own books and magazines; you can even earn entree to mainsteam media with your blogging. The barrier to entry has never been lower. If you're an artistically inclined rightwinger, even if you sincerely believe that Oliver Stone and Susan Sarandon and other manifestations of The Man are trying to keep you down, you ought to feel pretty good about your chances. They let Zach Braff make movies: why not you?

But still the dull complaints are reiterated: the liberals run this, the liberals run that. To backtrack a bit on Klavan's essay, he says, after a gloomy rundown of cultural decay, "I hardly need mention the movies and TV shows that endlessly undermine notions of manly self-discipline, feminine modesty, patriotism, and all the rest." Why say this to budding conservative artists? It's a great incentive to political operatives, but to a guy with a camera or a palette or an urge to write novels, it's an invitation to put the cart before the horse.

Maybe there are some Bizarro Zolas out there who can take this bile and make of it engaging political works of art. But those are always rare, and, our consumer culture shows, more rarely appreciated by audiences. If the scene is as devoid of conservative practitioners as Klavan and Libertas presume, why not instead encourage them to the simple joys and salutary discipline of creation? Klavan gets published, and the Libertas writers are supposed to be in the movie business. Why are their writings on the subject devoted to how badly the deck is stacked against them?

I fear this represents a managerial approach to art-making -- guys at the top of the chain of command dictate the creative brief, and others further down are supposed to address it with appropriate copy and art direction. That works okay with advertising and commercial design, but except for rare occasions, that isn't going to move the art needle. Experience shows that it is more likely to piss off the really smart CWs and ADs.

Even in the old punk rock days, there was a scene before there were hundreds of 'zines and commentators telling everybody how much better the scene was than the crap the majors had to offer. Maybe they think Seth Rogen is Big Star or Lester Bangs or something. But, if they can't get a Zola, they ought to get at least get some Televisions, Ramones, and Talking Heads. I know they're out there, and could use a little support. Even when you're a critics' darling, art's a hard dollar.

THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES. The Anchoress seems to think that if Obama becomes President, the United States will follow the lead of Canada, which "prosecutes thought crimes and suppresses free speech." She also believes that "the press" fails to cover stories of which she nonetheless appears amply informed, and this means the press is "no longer free."

This spurs me to the usual dismissive thoughts, but I am in some sympathy with her. Most of us who are paying attention will at one time or another feel that our society is insufficiently concerned with freedom of speech and that the press is missing the big picture on purpose. Sometimes we'll be right. I think conservatives frequently abuse the privilege, but the Mark Steyn thing sucks, as I have noted before.

A disinterested observer might wonder why this is such a point of contention. If anything should unite people who express opinions via the written word, it should be freedom of speech. With the exception of Jonah Goldberg and some others, few of us stick up for censorship. Yet we fight about it as if there were flammable stakes with our names on them dotting the horizon.

Setting aside for a moment my default assumption that I'm right and they're wrong, I think it may have something to do with what each side thinks would be an actionable offense in the dream world of the other. Being a Jesus person and global warming denialist, The Anchoress thinks religious dialogue (or at least rage at Islam) and global warming denialism will be the targets; being a foulmouthed berserker, I assume that, freed of all restraints, the conservative Imperium would hustle me off to reeducation camp to learn to say darn and heck.

Though the right seems to have a trademark on the phrase, the thing we all prize and guard jealously against incursions from the Other is political incorrectness. Endlessly this is proudly trotted out by authors as an offense to the timid sensibilities of opponents that may excite those opponents to a wave of repression. National Review's John Derbyshire is a master of this gambit; he seems to get visceral pleasure out of declaring that some obnoxious sentiment of his will soon be "illegal to utter." Yet, last I heard, Derbyshire is still living at home, writing for the Review, and unencumbered by an electronic bracelet.

Look around the salons of the libertarians -- revealing stupid prosecutions of speech is one of their useful functions -- and you'll find that most such outrages are the work of overzealous idiots who probably couldn't comprehend a Constitutional issue if it were rendered in an easy reading edition, and are mainly trying to cover their own lame asses. An inspired political yahoo could perhaps exploit this tendency to get a bunch of us thrown in prison, but here in the States at least it doesn't seem imminent.

And it isn't imminent because the authorities don't care what we say and they don't care what we think. Their main concern is money, and as long as we don't kink up the pipeline that connects the public treasury to their pockets, we can say whatever we want. We can curse and call Muhammed a punk as much as we like; maybe Time or Newsweek will print a meditation on civility or something, but no one will really get in our faces unless our words, clean or obscene, show signs of inciting a real power shift.

And really: what are the odds of that happening?

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, MAKE VENOMADE. Let's see how they're reacting to Obama's speech at National Review's The Corner. First up: Greg Pollowitz.

U2's "Beautiful Day"... is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?

Ooooh, the pickings are gonna be mighty slim. K-Lo:

John McCain seriously needs some of these screaming girls behind him.

Maybe A. Jerrold Perenchio can hustle some up. Class clown Jonah Goldberg says Obama wanted to say "I will appoint Hillary Clinton my Secretary of Health Human Services, no matter what opposition that invites." One is tempted to respond that Obama sounds pretty good for a guy who doesn't dare say what he feels, but let's leave Goldberg the floor.

He adds that Obama's claim that "the United States isn't afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for" is "the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy" is "just plain stupid and dishonest." Hopes that Goldberg will explain how FDR, Truman, and JFK were afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands are cruelly disappointed.

Also: "Why not force oil companies to invest in perpetual motion machines, dogs that don't poop and free holodecks for every American." This is Goldberg's point of comparison to Obama's call for oil companies to "invest their record profits in a clean energy future" and "an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs." Considering that ExxonMobil, for one, constantly promises clean energy and more jobs, this seems unfair to the oil companies, especially coming from a spokesman for a movement that lavishly tongue-bathes them at every opportunity.

Goldberg stays on duty, but his heart isn't in it: Obama "crushed" McCain's earlier speech, he concedes, "substance aside." Lack of substance is of course Goldberg's wheelhouse, but he doesn't do much with it, muttering that "this country doesn't need 'remaking'" and wandering off to the snackbar.

Late-coming deadender Lisa Schiffren tries to hold the line, sniffing that this was "Not his finest speech" (without suggesting which speech was), merely a "painful agglomeration of liberal cliches and ringing, if tired quotes" (how does one ring a tired quote?) when Obama's "A-team speechwriters should have honed original phrases and put them in thematic order." America is of course thirsty for original phrases in thematic order, and one would expect Schiffren to haul out the Smith-Corona and get straight to work on them, but she instead sticks with her spin: "When Obama says that his party won't use religion as a wedge or patriotism as a club, that is a way of saying that those topics are out of bounds," she says. "It's always a mistake when Democrats do that." I guess she means that the wedge and the club have worked before and will work forever, which is the Republican version of keeping hope alive. Later she attacks Obama with the words of demotivational speakers Brit Hume and Billy Kristol, under the heading "Wasp Understatement." At least, and at last, someone at The Corner is hauling out the old ooga-booga.

Reinforcements are called; Amy Holmes, no doubt rubbing sleep from her eyes, grabs an early version of the talking points and lets fly: "Dems love them some Bono, even though U2's best anthems are long behind them. I went to a U2 concert years ago at the MCI Center (is it called that anymore?)..." Finally she recalls that on that event, "all of the black people at the stadium are outside scalping tickets." I'm not sure what this is meant to demonstrate, but I bet it has something to do with black people.

Poor K-Lo can't let bad enough alone:

While watching Michelle Obama's body language — fist-pounding and seemingly giving Barack last-minute prep work, then vigorously leading him offstage. Imagine the commentary if she were one Jeri Thompson.

Yeah, let's imagine ole Fred shocked awake by the pounding of his wife's fist, shaking off his confusion as she shouts instructions into his good ear, and submitting to her "vigorously leading him offstage." It's good practice for the McCain campaign.

As the chairs are upturned upon the tables and the sound system blares white noise, Mark Hemingway dazedly invokes McCain's Maverick! credentials ("In what way are Obama's policies going against the Democratic grain?"), but his colleagues have retreated to the toilets to vomit or score coke from Larry Kudlow. Meanwhile I'm watching Brian Williams on MSNBC wondering aloud how the folks at Montana's Gallatin Speedway (translation: white people) will react to Obama. Williams also talks tremulously about McCain's war record. With liberal media support like that, I don't see how Obama can lose.

DO STOP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW. I find myself short of time, so let me take the lazy man's route to blog fulfillment and point you to editor Martin's site, where my favorite health reporter considers the Singularitized vision of our future:

Today the Times has a piece on [futurist Ray] Kurtzweil's latest predictions.

"Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight."

Oh, gross. Imagine all the skinny people gorging themselves constantly and shitting grease.

When we all get diabetes from overeating, there will be a nanobot-filled pill to fix that, too.

"Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging."

Unless, of course, you're black, or you live in the South.

An endorsement of Kurzweil and John Tierney from the Perfesser here. We all hope for the best, and the many brilliant successes of the modern age give us reason for hope. But we ought to be careful about shrugging off the past and present on the grounds that the future will fix them.

It stands to reason that conservatives would prefer the forward-looking approach, as the rear-view and the side-view too are very grim. At National Review, Yuval Levin is predicting that the coming election will "turn into more or less an up or down vote on Obama" -- as if the past eight years of the Bush Administration and Republican rule, poorly regarded as they are by the voters, may be forgotten. It is understandable that people who know they've fucked up would engage in this sort of wishful thinking, and hope that their fellow citizens will yet trust them to deliver on one more shining vision of tomorrow. But optimism only goes so far, at least among people who are more interested in the small gains that may be achieved by a change in government than in the big dreams of professional fantasists.

FOREVER CLENIS. Bill Clinton makes a ton of money and some of it goes to charity. But he lives in high style and has some sleazy friends. And a lot of people think he's been screwing around, maybe even with Gina Gershon and Eleanor Mondale, though none of these people have any evidence to offer Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair, nor will they go on the record.

Well, that's close enough for blog and roll. Right Pundits says, "I have to say that these women are much more attractive than the women that have acknowledged having had …. relations …. with him. There may be a reason for that, but I won’t go there." At NRO Jim Geraghty says, "I guess if you have dirt on the Clintons, you might as well use it now. No point in otherwise giving juicy details on the marriage of the junior senator from New York." Dirt and juice ensues. "He's always been this way," says Rightwing Sparkle, speaking of Clinton's "sociopathic behavior." "Vanity Fair used to worship BJ the same way it now worships Nobama. Socialism is the opiate of the mass media - which makes it a religious experience for them - and BJ is the worst of all heretics," says Bill Quick. (No, I have no idea, either.)

If you like it highbrow, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic points to his own previous circulation of Clenis rumors, tells us "if you'd asked me nine months ago to list the major roadblocks to Hillary's near-inevitable nomination, I would have put her husband's possible tomcatting right up there with her Iraq War vote," and does not scruple to "suggest a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media."

With the Hillary Clinton campaign winding down, you may think these guys are just welcoming a ripe opportunity for one last shot at their ancient enemy. But they will never, ever get over the Clenis. He'll always be the One That Got Away, and their blogs will always reserve a little corner for RPG do-overs of the impeachment.

I hope Bill gets all the pussy, props, and provender he is owed by a grateful nation. I only find in him one fault: that he retains his old habit of using too many words in self-defense. Maybe, when some new version of this story runs many years hence (FIRST SENIOR: WHO IS CLINTON'S NEW "NURSE"?), he'll have learned to leave it at "Kiss my rich, two-term ass."

SITE MAINTENANCE. I put Josh Trevino's Malaysia Matters on the Sui Generis bar at left. We've had some fun with Mr. Trevino in the past, but the subject is genuinely interesting and very different from the tomfoolery we get up to here, and may be worth some of your time.

Also added Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, which documents the scraping away of the old, weird New York in favor of high-rises and yuppie boites. He seems to concentrate on neighborhoods where I've lived myself, but I suspect this is coincidence, and not a message from the universe telling me to go forth and sabotage construction sites. Plus there's celebration along with the elegies -- I was pleased to learn from Jeremiah that Montero's is still serving down by the Brooklyn waterfront -- and more patient attention to ground-level reality (and realty) than I manage in my own ravings on the subject.

NEW VOICE POST UP, about some of our traditional subjects' responses to the Sex and the City film. Debbie Schlussel is already pissed, now it's your turn!

LAST GASPS. Obama leaves Trinity and the reaction is telling:

Obama can't stand the heat of a campaign without tossing aside his grandma, then his pastor, and now HIS WHOLE FREAKIN' CHURCH. One he'd been defending until NOW. One many leftists defended.

What a low life.

Unfit for the office.

Kerry had more class. At least he pretended to be honorable.

Later: "THE LEFT IS ALREADY SEEING OBAMA FOR WHAT HE IS. IT'S OVER. A NATIONAL NIGHTMARE AVERTED." In case you were wondering, this is not a disappointed former supporter, but one of the folks who were really counting on Reverend Wright to knock Obama out of the race and have just seen their last slim hope of it melt away.

Reliapundit is choleric under the best of circumstances, but the news is inciting strong language from even more temperate writers. "Thirty Pieces of Silver From the Pulpit," says RedState. "Why is he leaving all of a sudden? Is it because there is another untold story out there?" The author suspects shady in-church fundraising, based largely on his own experience as a perpetrator. (The post also contains yet another citation of Obama throwing someone, or being thrown, "under the bus," fattening that conservative meme for the winter, when its promulgators may need to live off it. )

Other make the best of the situation. "Now [Obama] is riding the whirlwind," writes Roger L. Simon. (Some whirlwind.) "Shocker... unbelievable!... UPDATE: Will Not Denounce Church!" says Gateway Pundit. Even the normally highbrow Victor Davis Hanson has to resort to all-caps: "So the question always arises-WHY?" he writes. "Is it because he didn't know the nature of his associates, OR is it because he finds their well-known messages suddenly as politically disadvantageous as he once found them essential in jump-starting his Chicago career?"

Most observers will guess the latter, and not be too exercised about it, as they are probably sick of hearing about Trinity Church and will welcome any development that puts an end to its coverage. It certainly will come up again, of course, but as a historical citation rather than as breaking news. By any rational analysis, the downside of this for Obama is very slight compared to the upside. But at the outrage factories where this sort of thing is stock in trade, it's as if one of their best-sellers were being recalled, so we can hardly blame them for making some noise about it.

UPDATE. Very interesting discussion in comments about how well or badly Obama plays these things in general. I'd say that he and his staff seem to do a lot of improvising, which is never a good sign from a political campaign. On the other hand, they improvise pretty adeptly; the "discussion on race" speech was good theatre and gave Obama a buffer against the Wright fallout. It wasn't a stopper, obviously, but it worked well enough to get him this far.

Tex, talking about the McClurkin episode, says "Well, it did cost him my respect. But he will still have my vote." Just so, and he's one of the few who remember McClurkin in the first place. We're well out of the time when naive enthusiasm was carrying the day for Obama, and into the difference-splitting part of the contest. This gives an advantage to McCain, who was never going to win an inspirational campaign; though his own improvisations haven't been so hot, the press hasn't belabored them nearly as much as Obama's.

It may be Obama will win or lose on his ability to play a game that has nothing to do with his advertised appeal as a healer. Right now, part of the opposition game plan is to reductively characterize Obama as a "Chicago politician" with old-fashioned backroom tricks up his sleeve. Well, he'd better be.

A COUPLE OF LIVE ONES. While we're on artistic subjects, I think we should acknowledge a couple of fallen heroes. Sydney Pollack was a director of, let us say, likeably modest talents; I have always prefered to think that what I saw on his face as he accepted the Oscar for Out of Africa from Billy Wilder, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa (!) included some embarrassment. But he had his moments, and real charm and skill as an actor. I can't compete with David Edelstein's magnificent summation at New York magazine, but I will add that the very thought of Pollack laying it all out for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut ("Okay. I think I should also tell you that I was there at the house." Tom Cruise: "Well, what an amazing coincidence." Pollack: "The words practically right out of my mouth") gives me the giggles, and I think he precisely caught the mordant Kubrick tone that baffled so many of the film's critics. It stunned me to learn that he'd been acting since the "Playhouse 90" days. Every time I saw him in a movie or on TV I thought, oh, here's Pollack slumming again. Maybe that's what they mean when they talk about making it look easy.

Also, word just came that Harvey Korman has passed. Korman was always willing to go too far, and on the Carol Burnett show you can often see how eager he was to crack up his fellow players. I still recall the impeccable timing of his reaction to Burnett's gushing Shirley Temple routine: he brought his fingertips to the bridge of his nose and, turning a beat into a drum solo, muttered, "Please, madam, I have diabetes." Blazing Saddles was his apotheosis. The movie pitched its tone on the border of hip and vaudeville, and while Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder worked the hipster angle, Korman came on with a fusillade of stutters, mad walks, lazzi and double-takes straight out of the Orpheum circuit. It played as well with stoned teenagers as it did with elderly variety-show fans. Hail and farewell to the last of the great schtickmen.

THE REICHSTAG ADVENTURE. While everyone else was enjoying Recount, I was attending a film about another great historical disaster, Downfall. It's certainly wonderful to see the great Bruno Ganz impersonate Hitler. We are introduced to him in 1942, where he is not flailing and screaming but visibly strange in a classically narcissistic way; he shows kindness, but at a palpable personal remove -- speaking to his prospective secretaries as if they were dumb creatures requiring soft speech to function properly -- that suggests his later ravings about the insufficiency of the German people didn't come from a last-minute psychological adjustment to disaster, but out of the core of his being.

Later, of course, when things are going less well for the Reich, we do see him flailing and screaming -- some of it has been memorably re-subtitled for YouTube parodies. And we get morose lethargy, truculence, delusory attachment to petty details, and so on. The most interesting section, Hitler-wise, comes in his final meeting with Albert Speer (the excellent Heino Ferch), who reveals that he has consciously failed to carry out the Fuhrer's "orders of destruction" and waits for a reaction. Hitler breaks a pencil -- quietly, with the palms of his hands -- adjusts his hair, stares away; pouts. Speer -- having survived his insufficient act of resistance -- gets up from his chair. "So you're leaving," says Hitler. "Good. Auf wiedersehen." He refuses to shake Speer's hand before he goes. He could have had him shot. That he doesn't is not an act of mercy, but of peevishness.

That's the kind of detail that sometimes makes Downfall more interesting than your run-of-the-mill historical drama. But it's from the Hitler part, and the solitude and mystery of the dictator seem to have spurred the imagination of the filmmakers more than the documentary events that make up most of the film. For these, Downfall is simply an efficient reenactment. It is something to see all these Nazis, infamous and obscure, facing their elaborately choreographed Gotterdammerung. And, to their credit, the filmmakers give enough clues to allow us to backwards-engineer the disaster in our minds: if these guys couldn't disobey orders as the Russians were encircling Berlin, you can imagine what they were like when things were going well.

But there doesn't seem to be much more to it than that: the Third Reich was an awful mistake, as you can see by the result. (It even invites fleeting sarcastic thoughts: Sure, hindsight's always 20-20.) The characters' varied reactions to the approach of disaster (from wild parties to fretful brooding) are believable and sometimes poignant but seldom illuminating. The few heroics and the abundant follies are alike swept up and engulfed in the horrible tide of events.

It seems terrible to say so, given the seriousness of the subject, but it can't be helped: Downfall is basically a disaster flick: multiple characters trapped in a Reich turned upside-down, each doing a star turn expressing some signal weakness or strength before his or her gruesome death or grateful rescue. In fact, for all its craft it's not up to the standards of Irwin Allen. Paul Newman's architect in The Towering Inferno was only first among glamorous equals; the architect of the Holocaust steals Downfall outright. I can't read Wim Wenders' complaint, available only in German, but I hear he was pissed about that. Maybe I flatter myself by assuming from translated snippets that he shares my view that this is primarily a dramatic problem. I certainly believe the makers meant well, but as Max Bialystock learned to his regret, you can't let Hitler have all the good lines.

EASY MONEY. At National Review, Jim Manzi is outraged that Obama would ask college graduates to heed a call to service. He also doesn't think much of Obama's decision to blow off a traditional career track and instead become a lowly community organizer, because he was just going to wind up a U.S. Senator and best-selling author anyway:

What's funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn't just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative — for a while. Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don't have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.

Similarly, any well-educated person who decides to pursue a career as an actor can expect to become a Hollywood star, so it's really not that much different from joining Goldman Sachs.

I hope this gets around. A widespread delusion that community organization is a sure path to riches will do wonders for urban blight. Even our worst neighborhoods will be as full of eager volunteers as soup kitchens at Thanksgiving.

YOUR EXCEPTION IS NOTED. A lot of Bush people and their supporters are royally pissed at former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and his new tell-all book. At NewsBusters, Rich Noyes complains that when Ari Fleischer issued a book that was far more complimentary to Bush than McClellan's, nobody wanted to cover it.

Noyes implies this is due to liberal media bias. Well, baby, you gotta gave a gimmick. Dee Dee Myers wisely chose to write a women's-empowerment book instead of a straight Clinton-era retrospective. Of course, if that former Press Secretary's tome had instead been all about how her boss was full of shit, I suppose that would have worked too. Dog bites man can be a story if the man is its master. Ask Louis Freeh.

But that just has to do with the stink McClellan's book has made and the copies it may sell. In political terms I don't expect much of a long-term impact from it. If Richard Clarke couldn't move the needle, what chance has Scott McClellan?

This got me thinking about David Stockman, first of the great celebrity White House apostates of the contemporary age -- that is, the age of Reagan, which we're still in. William Greider's Atlantic Monthly story in which Stockman spilled his guts about the Reagan Administration's economic malfeasance, and Stockman's own tell-all book, made him the most famous OMB Director in history (excepting, perhaps, Bert Lance).

Some people considered Stockman a hero, and praised his later experiments in enlightened capitalism. That's as may be, his recent criminal indictment on fraud and conspiracy charges notwithstanding (an auto-parts company he was running, and its employee pension fund, went bankrupt). But it's worth noting that Stockman's public disillusionment with the Reaganites gave him more stature than a quiet slinking-away would have accomplished. And other than a blip of bad publicity, it didn't do much harm to Reagan, either, nor to the policies he favored. Everybody won except the governed.

This isn't to suggest bad intent on Stockman's part, or McClellan's, but the way Washington works. No one is obliged to retain loyalty to a cause one has decided is corrupt. But no one can expect to make much of a difference by renouncing it, either. Not having read McClellan's book, I can't judge it as confessional literature or as dish. As a political artifact, it would seem, from the rumblings its digestion by the commentariat have caused (noisy but not clinically significant), to be pretty typical of its kind.

JUST A LITTLE JOKE BETWEEN YOU & ME. My latest jape. Jimbo was actually very nice about it, which of course ruins it for me.

UPDATE. His self-defense. Wilde and Whistler this ain't, but then a lot of things have gone downhill since the 19th Century.

THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST. Ron Rosenbaum's "In Praise of Liberal Guilt" at Slate has drawn some responses from conservatives who object, in varying degrees, to the notion that they should feel guilt about American racism.

The conversation is somewhat misguided. Whatever these worthies think about the effect of white guilt (or shame, or whatever they want to call it) on their own souls matters very little. Racism as a public issue is a different story.

Conservatives have built up a strong resistance to guilt trips of any kind over the years. They've learned to dismiss any gripe from anyone aggrieved (except their own constituent groups, of course) as politically correct nonsense. It's been useful for them in some ways, allowing them to project an air of certainty that is easily mistaken for strength, but in this instance it's getting to be a drawback. I never thought I'd say this, but Rod Dreher is actually onto something here:

That is, it's difficult to say, "Yes, conservatives were badly wrong on civil rights, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong today," because the left, in debate, tends to assume that the original sin of having been wrong in 1964 is ineradicable, and won't give any quarter. You can never win with liberals on racial questions, conservatives may figure, so it's better to adopt a defiant insouciance -- even if that attitude is not morally justified by the record.

I would add, though, that "you can never win with liberals" is unduly limited: when you take this sort of attitude, you can't win with a whole lot of people.

If you get around a little bit, you may have noticed that racism hasn't gotten any cooler over the years. Of course it persists -- strongly, in some pockets, and furtively in others under a variety of masks. But if you say outright crazy shit about black people, it doesn't play as widely as it might have in 1952.

We can argue about how much real progress this represents, but if you're the sort of conservative Dreher describes, it's pretty disastrous. If you regard the race card as a vampire regards garlic, it must be depressing to realize that Americans haven't lightened up about it. "Politically incorrect" phenomena such as "South Park" may sometimes buoy your spirits by convincing you that the heat's off, but then people get all bent out of shape about a radio joke, and your mood swing changes course.

You're left with bizarre fantasies in which Obama purposefully loses a state primary in order to slander its citizens as racists.

From this beaten-down perspective, with no hope of being recognized as the lovely race-neutral people they know themselves to be, conservatives looking at a Presidential contest with a black guy on the opposing ticket may worry that they'll have no choice but to energize whatever racist base is available to them. This the more tender-hearted among them must dread, because it may contribute to an unfortunate misperception of themselves. And it may explain why they think the tiresome topic of white guilt is worth discussing in the first place.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. Megan McArdle is away from her desk for reasons unknown -- from this photo it seems she may have at last found honest work as a telemarketer -- leaving a bunch of young guest-bloggers to romp and play in her stead. Peter Suderman -- at 17, the elder statesman of the group -- does big-boy blogging; they rest try to get away with the same shit that flew in their college newspapers.

Tim Lee lays out the case for Technology is Awesome. Here he explains that companies sometimes give away digital content because "giving away information goods (which have zero marginal cost) can expand the market for other goods that can then be sold at a profit," but cautions, "Figuring out what to give away and how to monetize the resulting attention is a difficult problem that everyone, from Facebook to the Atlantic is struggling to solve." Yuh don't say! Next he'll be telling us about the challenges facing our next President.

Lee follows up with that evergreen of the neverlaid, How Blogs Will Totally Replace Newspapers. Folks who reflexively assert that the New York Times does a better job of covering world events than a guy with a Wordpress account and several college buddies studying abroad are mired in oldthink:

There are fewer organizations that aspire to cover "all the news that's fit to print." But while that might worry people who are used to the predictability of 20th-century organizational methods, the new system is likely to be better. Specialization allows publications to develop deeper bench of talent in the topics they cover. A swarm of smaller organizations gives the system more flexibility. And the lower barriers to entry allow a proliferation of new voices that provide unique perspectives on the news.

And the great thing is, our Citizen Journalists get paid in buzzwords! I bet Lee prefers Taster's Choice to real coffee because it uses advanced freeze-drying technology.

My favorite is Conor Friedersdorf. First, there's the name: can't you picture him, peachfuzz painstakingly sculpted into a French Beard, smoking jacket carrying a crest of his own invention, snifter filled with Pibb Xtra? And Young Friedersdorf has a poetic streak:

Consider Las Vegas after 12 hours: already there is an urge to escape. The once quaint sounds of the casino floor clank against the nerves. You discern wrinkles beneath the caked-on makeup of haggard cocktail waitresses and paunch on black-jack dealers whose slouches gradually deepen.

Well, timor mortis conturbat me silly! Can't wait for the next installment, in which cackling crones of 28 are compared to witches and someone puts a cigarette out in a plate of eggs.

Friedersdorf also has posts about how New York is exciting, and conservatives aren't racist, look at Clarence Thomas, but really anything he writes is worth savoring. I hope McArdle is thinking legacy, and not only because that would mean she was leaving.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP here. It's about the many ways in which wingers use unverified rumors to spread mischief. See, rather than merely assert that the stories are true, they -- hey, hey, you drifted off there. Yeah, I know. Starting next week I'm going with this sort of thing. As my dear old mother used to say: "That's what people want to see, not your stupid bullshit."

UPDATE. Second link Not Safe For Work, you squares. No, I said the second -- oh, wait I meant the first! Yeah, the first!

"THIS IS YOUR FUTURE," PART TWO. The Ole Perfesser:

Well, I don't think that food prices aren't up. I do the grocery shopping for my household, and believe me, I've noticed; my average grocery run costs about 20 bucks more than last year. Rather, my point was the lameness of media efforts to report on that -- interviewing people at fancy gourmet markets? -- and the cheesiness of their "holiday" angle. As is often the case, even as they try hard to manufacture one bit of bad news, they're actually missing the real bad news, because reporting on that usefully would require actual work. As I've noted on this topic before, their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. The data in the AP story don't prove its ostensible point -- that holiday barbecues (by which they mean cookouts, not actual barbecue) are vastly more expensive -- but to do an actual story on what food prices are up across the board, and why, would be actual work and wouldn't produce the "holiday angle" that editors want.

This has been a sneak preview of John McCain's response to economic questions in the forthcoming Presidential debates, minus reminders that the subject was a prisoner of war. Republican operatives will be dazzled by the anger at wire services, parsing of the words "cookout" and "barbecue," and reference to "fancy gourmet markets"; ordinary Americans, not so much.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS MEMORIAL DAY POST: Fucking Australian hippies, I'll show you! I've boycotted Mescan vodka and I'll boycott Green vodka! We shall fight on the benches, we shall fight on Jasperwood's various garden areas, we shall fight in the Lunds and Byerlys and Kowalskis, we shall fight about the bags; we shall never surrender.

UPDATE. According to the Greenhouse Calculator that so incensed Lileks, I should have died a long, long time ago. This fills me with joy, for I consider my entire life a gleeful evasion of what society expects of me, and the Calculator just confirms it. Poor Jimbo has internalized political correctness to such an extent that he must rage at the New Order that dares inform him he has transgressed. Young Republicans, past and present, take note: as the Captain told Babu in Benito Cereno, this is your future.

MEMORIAL DAY: ANNUAL LIGHTING OF THE LOGO. The folks at National Review Online haven't posted their usual complaints (yet) about Google's lack of a Memorial Day logo. The Ole Perfesser picks up the fallen standard (and pimps a link to a search engine that seems designed for lonely masturbators, though I didn't enjoy it at all).

CORRECTION: NRO's K-Lo did get to it, and early. I must have my filters on "high."

I thought we had this problem solved. But, hell, some prefer barbecue on Memorial Day, and some like to shop; everyone has his own tradition. Billy Kristol wants us to say thanks to soldiers on the street. Most Americans would like to show them more tangible appreciation.

Nothing wrong with that, but though the sentiments of Memorial Day accrue naturally to standing servicemembers, it was invented to honor the fallen. Whatever I think about this nation's military adventures, past and present, I know that millions died in them. That's worth a thought at least, and let contemplation take us where it may.

A SAD AND LONELY WORLD. Michelle Malkin, who has been boycotting Starbucks and supporting Dunkin' Donuts, not for sound gustatory reasons but for political reasons no ordinary person could understand, considers extending her jihad to Dunkin' Donuts because their spokesman Rachel Ray briefly appeared in something that looked like a scarf a Palestinian might wear.

When Sadly, No! first tauntingly proferred the keffiyah thing to Malkin, I thought: not even she is insane enough to actually take this bait. Now that she has, I'm beginning to get an unaccustomed feeling of Christian sympathy for her. What a small, strange world she lives in -- one in which even simple breakfast choices are fraught with peril. What are her lunch and dinner choices like? When she goes to a restaurant, does she peer into the waiters' station and wonder which servers are gays who wish to be married, peer into the kitchen and wonder which dishwashers are illegal aliens? When she makes her own meals, does she claw through the fridge and pantry like Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, frantically searching the labels for signs of politically incorrect associations?

I rescued a kitten in Chinatown once. Her time on the streets had traumatized her, and while she was with me, she hissed at anything that moved, however slightly: toys, fingers, curtains caught in the wind, CD changer drawers, etc. I called her Spit. She finally found a nice home and, I'm told, calmed down and began to enjoy life. The idea of any living creature retaining such a horrible, all-embracing phobia into maturity chills me to the bone.

Of course, maybe she's just faking it for bucks, in which case I feel better and she should be thrown off a cliff.

JOKERS TO THE RIGHT. John McCain has repudiated Reverend Hagee's endorsement. This is probably a good piece of deck-clearing in advance of McCain's planned Grandpa Simpson offensive against Obama, and gets good notices from credentialed rightwing operatives. But at the fringes of the movement, he gets pushback. Michelle Malkin, tying it to the Parsley rejection:

The Straight Talk Express is starting to look like its 2000 model. Repudiationmania!... How much further can he go in playing chicken with Christian conservatives? “Outreach” ain’t going to carry him through...

She also asks McCain to repudiate Michael Bloomberg. At Free Republic, commenters are even more direct:

Soneone needs to get the word to McCain- QUIT PANDERING TO THE LEFT WING!!!!

..and what about LA RAZA ? Are they next..?

I guess the RINO relic can say with a straight face, I was again’ him, before I was with him, before I was again’ him again.

You f with Hagee you f’in with the REAL evangelicals. This could cost him dearly. I hope it does.

We usually leave the Freepers out of it, but these people are the baser part of the base, and they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the Straight Talk Express. Now you see why.

It has been something of a talking point that Obama has known Reverend Wright forever while McCain's link to Hagee was very shallow. And so it was -- but endorsements, as opposed to friendships, are made for political purposes, and rejected for the same reason. No doubt some cost-benefit analysis was done before McCain finally pulled the pin. Hagee was part of what was supposed to shore up McCain's support among the red-meat conservatives -- not the National Review crowd, but the folks who want to save the fetuses by firing on the NEA with cannons stuffed with black people. Rejecting Wright was obviously painful for Obama, but the pain McCain will suffer from this is of a different kind. Obama doesn't have to worry about losing the Kill Whitey vote in consequence. The Hagee supporters, in contrast, may just reckon that God's kingdom is not of this earth, and stay home on Election Day to whittle and beat their children.

ISSUES ARE FOR PUSSIES. Obama briefly and rather gently rebukes McCain for his position on the GI Bill; McCain responds berserkly:

It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of. Let me say first in response to Senator Obama, running for President is different than serving as President. The office comes with responsibilities so serious that the occupant can't always take the politically easy route without hurting the country he is sworn to defend. Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America's veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor...

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was playing in the background, and Rambo came out at the end to strafe reporters with machine-gun fire.

McCain was recently described by Karl Rove as "one of the most private individuals to run for president in history" and one of those "who are uncomfortable sharing their interior lives." Well, he got over that quick. His new plan is apparently to go Grandpa Simpson on Obama ("who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform") in hopes that America will prefer a belligerent war hero to a skinny civilian who pauses when he talks.

It's not a bad ploy. Democrats, having been inextricably tied in the public mind to draft-dodging hippies, don't have the luxury Republicans lately availed of talking down McCain's service, so Obama can only react to McCain's rage by (as he did in this instance) attempting to return attention to the actual subject. And when has that ever worked?

This country is fucked, but at least we're in for some lively Presidential debates on our way to the ash-heap of history. Expect cries of "Why, you young punk!" and "I'm a U.S. Serviceman, who the fuck are you?" and Charlie Gibson whistling for the MPs.

THE SELF AS SUBJECT. There's already some mocking reaction to the Emily Gould NYT Magazine article on her life and blog times, and seen one way her story is eminently mockable. She describes her ascent from just another me-blogger to internet "celebrity" via Gawker, and the personal details that she couldn't keep from broadcasting throughout, and background on those details that she hadn't previously shared. Of course it's appalling narcissistic, and the fact that it's a cover story in the Times magazine might give any sensitive soul in a bad mood the impression that the world has gone mad.

But I wound up feeling sympathy for Gould. First, because writing's a hard dollar, and writers must get it how they can: if the Times (or the Voice) comes knocking, why would you turn away? Her own story was what she had to sell. I doubt they would have let her cover the Balkans.

I also sympathize because narcissism is an occupational hazard of writers, or maybe a precondition. It takes tremendous gall to publish anything, even on the easy terms of blogging. Few writers start out as an authority on anything except themselves, and often have to be pulled like mules toward another subject. Journalism is very often the writer's introduction to the world outside himself, and ideally the demands of the craft take over, leaving style and sensibility as the pleasing distinctions that make Jane's coverage different from John's.

But Gould's Gawker beat encouraged her to more overt forms of self-revelation:

Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn’t otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a surefire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions, turning the solitary work of writing posts into something that felt more social, almost like a conversation.

Not being familiar with her work, I can't say whether this tendency was good or bad for it there (it obviously wasn't good for her personally, as her panic attacks indicate), but I can say that some of the most entertaining writers of the web are not above this sort of thing, and in fact their writing benefits from it. Terry Teachout's journalistic credentials are impeccable, but he writes about himself a fair amount, and makes it resonant, about something bigger than himself, and even illuminative of the points he makes in his arts criticism.

So that, in and of itself, isn't such a bad thing. There's always someone underneath all the words, and if he isn't too overeager to come out and steal the show, he may play a useful part on the surface of the writing, maybe even the main role. It takes a great deal of self-awareness to get that right, and that may be (along with the punishing hours, lousy pay, and enforced solitude) why so many writers drink, take drugs, behave badly in public, and have troubled relationships and, well, panic attacks.

The difference between Teachout's writing and Gould's is large but not categorical. Any subject can be worthwhile, even yourself, so long as you don't forget that it's a subject. Time and craft will take care of the rest if you heed them. This is not meant as advice to Gould -- who, being vastly more successful than I, doesn't need it -- but as a reminder to myself, which I share because that's what this gig is all about: the occasional residue of observation and thought that might be worth someone else's attention.

NO-BRAINER. George Packer's New Yorker article on the decline of the American conservative movement is okay, but it has two major themes and only sustains one of them.

The successful point, that conservative thinking is now moribund, is simple enough to show, and Stephen Bainbridge does a good job of underlining it by complaining on his blog that conservatives don't need new ideas, that they've been right all along, and that their mystical devotion to a Kirkean "people’s historic continuity of experience" is all that's needed. Next to this kind of fierce certainty, the tinkering of rightwing New Jacks Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat (the latter of whom describes his work to Packer, hilariously, as "a data-driven attempt at political imagination") seems absurdly twee, like trying to advance the Ratzinger Catholic agenda with a better kind of Folk Mass.

The problem is Packer's second point: that citizens are now unreceptive to the traditional conservative approaches. Pat Buchanan describes these to Packer as elemental: "... you can write columns and things like that, but they don't engage the heart. The heart was engaged by law and order. You reached into people -- there was feeling." Covering a rural John McCain campaign stop, Packer focuses on McCain's discomfort with the red-meat politicking the event required of him -- but nonetheless McCain did it, and it seemed to go over.

There's plenty of evidence that the voters are increasingly receptive to Democrats, but as you can see by the early anti-Obama campaigning apparent on the blogs and in the press, sometimes covered here, you can still get a lot of mileage out of calling Democrats elitist and out of touch, and even by tying them to ancient radical menaces like the Black Power movement. An intellectual might consider this approach shopworn, but political battles in this country are not exclusively intellectual events. You don't have to believe that the dead-enders are right to acknowledge that voters may yet be susceptible to their themes.

The main problem is that Packer treats the conservative movement as a serious intellectual force, and thinks its diminution as such will lead inevitably to defeat. Pitchfork Pat may have been trying to throw Packer a clue when he quoted Eric Hoffer to him: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama's Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can't pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

YOU'RE RIGHT. THIS ACT HAS GOTTEN STALE. I'M GOING TO SEEK NEW HORIZONS. I forgot what I had against libertarians (Eloise at the Atlantic being a poor example of, well, anything) so I went to Reason's Hit and Run blog to refresh my enmity. There I found

• A lengthy example of the "I saw a silly liberal who said a silly thing" genre mastered by Alan Bromley and other conservative writers with active imaginations and absent editors -- very fine of its kind, but lacking a cab driver.
  
  
• A proposal that New Orleans replace Somalia as the official Libertarian Paradise since the citizens are "rebuilding on their own" thanks to a lack of competent Federal assistance. (Oddly, the author fails to make the obvious connection with the recent Chinese earthquake, the effects of which we may assume will teach self-reliance to millions.)
  
  
• Appreciative guffaws over Tim Cavanaugh's jovial response to the latest gay marriage controversy, basically saying that the concerns of silly gays are "boring" and their opponents are much more fun, and like who cares because someday we'll all look back on these days of second-class citizenship and laugh, especially if we're first-class citizens ourselves. (A timeline for the looking-back-with-laughter is not offered, but I'd advise those looking forward to it to find something to pass the waiting time, such as reading every book in their local library or knitting a cover for the barn.)

Actually most of it was inoffensive and some of it was even trenchant, at least to this statist's tired old government-worshipping eyes. But the fact remains: libertarians stand too close to you when they talk, sing along with Frank Zappa songs (even the obscure ones), and smell.

THE TREASON OF TECTONIC PLATES. Gazillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says that not only is the press lying about our glorious war in Iraq, it's enlisting Communist help:

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People's Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Today the top stories on the website of the New York Post, which carries Peters' column, concern Governor Patterson's migraine headache, a pay raise for the NYPD, and SPITZER AND THE HOOKER BY TV'S "LAW & ORDER" -- GOV. SCANDAL INSPIRES SHOW. Not a word about victory! Maybe Jane Fonda will bring Rupert Murdoch to the People's Republic. Oh wait -- he's already there.

FRAUD SQUAD. At National Review Online's The Corner, Andrew Stuttaford delivers a standard-issue plea for "skepticism" about climate change (or, as he puts it, "'climate change'"), but finishes:

That said, whatever their practical effects (some would be good, others not), McCain’s gestures to greenery are politically shrewd. Environmentalism is these days not only a widely-held civic religion, but, at least amongst some folk, a religion religion. Friendly nods in its direction are therefore a good electoral move, essentially harmless, and in the finest tradition of American political pandering: the equivalent, perhaps, of just another prayer breakfast.

As a wise man once (reportedly) said, “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

The Cornerites previously briefed Rudy Giuliani in the uses of dissimulation in getting over on gun nuts and abortion foes; Stuttaford's post suggests they may be preparing to give McCain lying lessons as well. Having previously been very, very cold toward the man they now embrace, they are certainly qualified to do so.

Obama is at a real disadvantage here. All his hope 'n' change stuff begs for conservatives to attempt to debunk it. Their ploys, from Rev. Wright to "Sweetiegate," have been mostly flimsy, sometimes even admittedly so, as with Jim Geraghty's item at NRO telling readers that though he is a "skeptic" of the rumor that Michelle Obama rails against "whitey" on a videotape, people may be inclined to believe it, which justifies his repeating it.

So they keep it up, throwing whatever they can get hold of, and declaring that their fusillades have penetrated Obama's facade, mask, disguise, fraud, etc. to reveal his socialist agenda, racism, devotion to Islam or the Devil or some damn thing -- because if he weren't guilty of some of it at least, why would people be paying attention? And when Obama pitches it back at them, he is accused of being thin-skinned, whiney, and, of course, guilty.

Obama is thus vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy because he has raised high expectations, and even an imputation of fault can reduce him. A similar counter-offensive against McCain can't be nearly as effective -- not because he is any less of a politician than Obama, but because no one sees in him anything to be hypocritical about.

Small wonder his supporters would so openly advise him to lay on the bullshit. It's their greatest strength.

UPDATE. Regarding the Michelle Obama tape rumor, commenter Julia asks, "Why is it, do you think, that all the angry black person dialogue these people invent for two ivy-educated lawyers with government jobs sound like Link from the Mod Squad?"

NEW VOICE POST UP. They haven't caught on to me yet! By the time they realize what a fraud I am, it will be too late... for everything! Meanwhile enjoy this post about bloggers who turn rightwing frowns upside down by standing history on its head.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Here is my yearly advertorial for Disney World. My only complaint is that the security staff failed to take a woman wearing an obnoxious t-shirt to the basement, but maybe that's because I only complained with mind-rays.

DEPEND ON ME. An old friend came into town this weekend and I went with him to see Graham Parker at Joe's Pub. I hadn't seen Parker since Squeezing Out Sparks days, when he played with the Rumour in a cruddy rock theatre in Long Island. (The Atlantics opened!) Back then he was a stick of a guy, creeping among the players as if they were providing him cover -- not fearfully but cheerfully, a hide-and-seek thing, like the occasional lifting of his sunglasses and flare of his smile through his tight, thin lips.

Friday he was still skinny, still cheeky, but all alone, and obviously used to working that way in small rooms -- my friend saw him in Cleveland once playing for a sadly small crowd, and in a career like Parker's, sustained by memories of glory and the rare custom of afficianadoes, you have to expect a lot of those. Joe's Pub was packed and loving, but Parker still gave out with some chagrined memories -- very amusing and told with a smile, but chagrined -- of bad gigs in unappreciative towns (he named some; chivalry forbids). That was just roughage, though. He sang beautifully -- a little husky at the edges, but pleasingly so, and with the same twang an old fan would recognize from Howlin' Wind.

There was less aggression in his voice. Some of that might have been in deference to the size of the room or the rigors of the road or to a diminution of his strength, but it felt as if Parker had turned a few corners and come naturally to a gentler approach. So "Local Girls" was a romp, not an indictment, and "Passion is No Ordinary Word" was passionate but in a more rounded and reflective way than it had been in that noisy Rumour show. The later material, which I hadn't followed, suited his new gentility even better. Those songs were as lit from within as his others, well-crafted and deeply felt, but with rue and accommodation built into the lyrics. "Depend on Me" stuck with me particularly. There isn't a lot of very clever wordplay in it (though "if you lose your mind, it's only in your head" is very good), but the clarity of the sentiment makes up for it. It's the sort of song you get when you don't have to try so hard because you've been doing this long enough that you can let the feeling take over. I don't know how "Come on, baby, take my word/My word's about as good as it gets/I know the language of your heart/Better than the alphabet" looks printed out like this to people who haven't heard him sing it, but in context it's just damned lovely. One might with some justice see it as a lazy trope, built out of common speech, but rhythm-and-bluesmen -- and that's what Parker has always been -- know how to make common speech luminous. It sounded to me, not like it came from his heart, but like it came from mine, and was saying things I couldn't say. That's not just a good song. That's why songs exist in the first place.

MORE IN ANGER THAN IN SORROW. At the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel sees that voters are angry (you don't say), and concludes -- how's this for counter-intuitive thinking? -- that it's good news for the Republican Party:

The presidential candidates tapped into this anger early, no one more so than Mr. Change, Barack Obama. John McCain laid out his first-term vision in a speech this week, but also bashed the Washington "politics of selfishness, stalemate, and delay." This McCain refrain helps explain why he remains competitive with Mr. Obama – in particular among independents.

Mr. McCain's agenda is not "centrist," but conservative. Independents are behind it because the Republican has convinced them he is apart from the status quo, and will get things done.

McCain is indeed polling better among independents than he has a right to expect, but the more cynical among us may attribute this to his whiteness, his relative invisibility, and the as-yet great distance between today and the day on which voters have to face the terrifying possibility that he could become President. Certainly there's not much indication that the conservatism Strassel attributes to his agenda is what's putting independents "behind it" (read: almost polling as well as Obama) considering that the nation's foremost conservative avatar is the least-approved President in recorded history.

Strassel also sees reason for cheer further down the ticket:

House Republicans appear to be catching on. This week they rolled out the first part of an election-year agenda that pointedly lists their legislative "solutions" to the problems of today. It is aimed at women, and includes innovative proposals to help families struggling to balance work and home. To follow will be calls for more domestic energy production, a free-market health agenda, national security and entitlement reform.

Take a look at the National Republican Congressional Committee site. They're bragging on Medicare reform, No Child Left Behind, border security, Homeland Security, and, of all things, the economy ("Thanks to Republican economic policies, the U.S. economy is robust and job creation is strong"). They're applauding themselves on veterans' issues, which looks ridiculous already and will look worse come the Bush G.I. Bill veto. On every issue they're basically inserting new buzzwords into the same agenda that delivered them to ignominious defeat in 2006. Calling this "aimed at women," "innovative," and "free-market" isn't a substantial improvement.

I don't take much pleasure in refuting standard-issue Republican talking points as if I were a Sunday morning talk-show dipshit, and I certainly don't hold out much hope for the next election or indeed the future of this country, whose lucky streak seems to be drawing to a close. But Strassel's lazy new-beginnings crap is just too much to stand. One Dick Morris is more than enough. Now I see Andrew Sullivan is reverting to form, talking about McCain's "long record with Latinos" and "green McCain logo, with a recycling symbol on it" as if they meant anything at all, and plumping for "McCameronism" as if he were fresh off the boat with New Tory scripture under his arm, seeing Mrs. Thatcher in every hammy Republican face and babbling about an "Anglosphere" that will save us all from socialized medicine and fifth columnists. It was hard enough to live through the revival of hair bands and leg-warmers; now I have to watch Sullivan fall in love with the Republican Party all over again just because it's doing its hair a little different these days.

Prepare yourselves, brothers and sister, for a new avalanche of bullshit.

BIRTH TRAUMA. At Sadly, No! Gavin does a fine job of twitting Pat Buchanan's latest Death of the West column. Buchanan is concerned that the Jewish people are being outbred by the jihadists, and blames the secularization of many Chosen, specifically "American Jews themselves, who have led the battles for birth control and a woman's right to choose."

This sort of thing comes up fairly often in conservative circles. Along with everything else the West is doing wrong, it isn't having enough children. Yet I have seldom seen a mechanism proposed for solving the problem. Criminalizing abortion is usually implied, but not often stated outright, perhaps because the moment such authors find themselves typing a simple declarative sentence stating that we must force people to have babies so the West can outnumber its enemies, they start to imagine how normal people would react. Better to just throw up the numbers and let the punters figure it out themselves.

Some authors, of course, are not so reticent. Way back in 2000 Steve Sailer proposed a very specific program of incentives and disincentives, including this:

Start a campaign telling citizens it's their patriotic duty to have more kids. Most Europeans are probably too self-destructively sophisticated to respond to this, but the Greeks might, since the Turks give them somebody to hate and fear.

But you see the problem. Hate and fear may be a sufficient aphrodisiac in some cultures, but we in the decadent West are, by Sailer's own admission, too self-destructive for this demographically-driven sort of hate-fuck, and prefer scented candles and maybe a nice dinner with wine. Maybe by now Sailer has moved on to edible body paint subsidies; I haven't got the stomach to look.

The most comprehensive program I ever saw was Stanley's Kurtz's, which involved reversing or destroying enough social programs that "people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age — and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary." In fact, on at least an unconscious level, the Republican Party seems to have been following this plan for years. But they've been getting a lot of push-back lately, so the collapse of the safety nets that encourage birth control may not be effected in time.

If they were really serious about all this, they might consider a different approach.

For years conservatives complained about the babies welfare mothers were having on the public dime. We got welfare reform, and conservatives have been cheered by what they see as the resulting decline in our illegitimate birthrate, especially among black people.

Maybe it's time the demographic-suicide wing of the movement communicated to their brethren at the City Journal and the Heritage Foundation the pressing need for more American children, and proposed a welfare counter-reformation to jack up the birth rate by any means necessary. In fact, if they really think the issue is as important as they portray it, maybe our welfare programs should be made more generous than before. What matter that many of the babies may be illegitimate and impoverished? All the better for the "hate and fear" conditions that will make committed anti-jihadists out of them.

This will be expensive, but we are at war, after all. Instead of fooling with untried plans and issuing dolorous rants, why not go with what has been shown to work in the not-so-distant past?

UPDATE. Commenter aw points out that Australia has already got a "baby bonus" program in place. But, alas, the new Labor Government is chipping away at it. Next year they introduce a means test, so upscale parents will have no incentive to procreate. And if a Centrelink officer thinks a household suffers from one or more of a list of social maladies, their payment is broken into fortnightly payments, presumably to keep the parents from spending the loot on plasma TVs, and the Government is pushing to substitute vouchers for cash payments in some hard cases.

With Australia's birth rate at a 10-year high, this seems no time to go wobbly. If Mama wants a wide-screen telly and a full bar for her efforts, I say let her have them.

SHORTER ENTIRE CONSERVATIVE BLOGOSPHERE: The voters hate us -- here's hoping they hate faggots worse!

Special credit to Bench Memos' Gerard V. Bradley (last of the abovelinked), who labors valiantly to extract a pro-gay-marriage angle out of Obama's anti-gay-marriage statements, eventually seizing on the fact that Obama favors civil unions and McCain does not -- in other words, while there's not much between them on the Constitutional question, Obama is nicer to gays who wish to live as partners, which Bradley sees as a fatal weakness.

Well, at least it's not like the old days, when some of these clowns played patty-cake with Andrew Sullivan and acted like it was merely some procedural or philosophical question that kept gay folks and right-wingers from achieving perfect union, one they could work out with more Op-Ed pieces. In the last ditch (and for them, that's what this is), they'll quickly sell their old debate buddies up the river. Let's be charitable about it: In one sense, this does show that conservatives are prepared to treat gay people the same as anybody else.