WHAT HAPPENS TO A MEME DEFERRED? Hey kids, says Andrew Sullivan, if we all clap our hands as hard as we can, we'll save Tinkerbell -- I mean, if we all blog about Iran on July 9, we'll overthrow the mullahs!

(Eventually, when Iran falls, excitable Andy will tells us all about the role played by the blogs.)

I preferred it when Sullivan was just asking us to call him an "eagle." Wonder how that meme's going?

BEYOND BELIEF. Slate's "In Other Magazines" column links to a dilly: a column at the Weekly Standard calling for a new "great American newspaper." Billy Kristol sounds the charge with one of those plainly unbelievable assertions his kind are made for: "Its editorial page could be conservative or liberal, as long as it was thoughtful and serious..."

Already Bluto is coughing "Blowjob!" behind his fist. Does anyone who has ever read or heard more than a few sentences from Kristol believe he means this? Of course not -- it's as big a load of crap as Fox's "fair and balanced."

Soon enough Kristol gives readers the wink: the New Paper should not be "ignorantly disdainful of Red America..." Nudge nudge, say no more.

We're talking, in other words, about a conservative house-organ which would not be perceived as such. Later at the Standard, expostulating on Kristol's theme, David Gelertner is more obvious, praising "the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal" and the laughable New York Sun as models.

The recent troubles at the New York Times have brought forth an ocean of crocodile tears over journalism besmirch'd. Like most professions of disappointment made by lifelong enemies, they are largely unbelievable.

While some Times critics are motivated by personal vendetta (like the most disappointed office-seeker since Charles Guiteau), and some few by genuine concern for j-standards, most of the current mob are merely trying to discredit a paper that has historically backed Democratic candidates for office and (in some dimly-remembered past before Joe Lelyveld) flashed some teeth at the conservative movement.

In other words, pundits whose only interest (indeed, whose primary source of income) is propaganda are not reliable witnesses for pure journalism.

Claims of bias can be weighed and measured, but conservatives who claim ideological malfeasance at the Times have a hard time getting around the fact that the paper has a massive, highly professional infrastructure. When you can do anything as well as they do news, bias is literally a secondary issue.

The Times also has the one great benefit of reputation and seniority: at a time when most media outlets pander slavishly to the whims of its prospective readerships, the paper actually requires its audience to make some concessions to its own way of doing things. Those who complain that the Times has been "dumbed down" in recent years should get a load of what the competition is printing. Yeah, the Times does silly stuff like this, but that's a small drop in a big pond of remarkably comprehensive, literate coverage.

If you're smart enough to read the Times, you're smart enough to pick out the nits of bias. Falsehoods are something else again. The Times knows that -- which is why Jason Blair was fired. Indeed, that's ultimately why Raines and Boyd were "resigned." (It was, at least, the sword these two gave their enemies to use against them.)

As for Kristol's and Gelertner's white whale, I'll give it a look if it ever comes to pass, but I expect no better than the New York Post with big words.

WE'RE NOT FASCISTS, GIVE US MONEY. National Review Online is pulling another one of its lame libertarian acts. Goldberg leans against government intervention on matters of spam; Ponnuru agrees, prefers "less formal social pressures" (I'm all for that, but when I write spammers back with "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!" my message never gets through). John Miller is squishy on amnesty for illegal immigrants, Ponnuru raps sin taxes, and so forth.

I think it has to do with their current, strenuously-persued pledge drive -- it's easier to grub change with fun conservatism than the other kind.

Don't take it too seriously, though. None of them has anything to say about the flag-burning amendment bill recently pushed through the House. No fun NRO angle there! And the house argument about gay marriage is still so heavily weighted that the moderate position is represented by John Derbyshire telling homosexuals to shut up and be glad with what they've got. ("Stop pushing the envelope. Envelopes can break.")

I'm grateful for small blessings: Stuttaford's Finnish joke is quite good. Not worth any money, though.

COME ON, PEOPLE, THIS IS IMPORTANT! WIGB said last week, "Gregory Peck and David Brinkley both just died. These things tend to happen in threes. Who's going to be the third?"

Angus Young, according to the Castel-Dodge site, which reports the AC/DC guitarist dead since Thursday.

But there's nothing at this writing on AC/DC.net, nor at the Elektra AC/DC site except some querulous chat messages branding the report a lie.

If someone's fucking with us, I just have to tell him that I'm not having the greatest day, couldn't you have waited? Because Angus Young being dead would really suck.

UPDATE. Turns out to have been a rumor. I think. Castel-Dodge withdraws, nothing on news-fan sites. Weird...

POST HOC PROPTER HOC. Instapundit:

21ST CENTURY SUBURBAN PARADISE: I'm blogging on the laptop from the deck via wireless, while sipping a Redhook IPA and grilling steaks. Is this a great country, or what?

I'm blogging on my PowerMac 9500 from my slum via dial-up, while guzzling a Budweiser and burning a Pall Mall Light. This country sucks.

COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM AT WORK.The New York Post continues to push for an end to rent stabilization. As befits an operation wedded to the notion that landlords, once freed from the stabilization yoke, will start charging less for apartments, these boys are very good at logic games. Operative Steve Cuozzo today contributes this breathtaking bagatelle:

...the blocks south of Chambers Street are already enjoying an "affordable" housing boom. To understand this, it's necessary to strip the word of its politically correct context... None is likely to be cheap. But we may count on them to be affordable, which in the English language has but one meaning: What people are willing and able to pay for. Only in the dreamland of social engineering does "affordable" mean something quite different: what certain people - people of lesser means - can afford. It may drive socialist ideologues batty, but in Manhattan, all new apartment homes are affordable in the meaningful sense. This is not semantic sophistry, but fact.

Using similar rationales, we could demonstrate that tubercular bums living beneath an overpass are making a "living wage," because they are still alive.

"VITAMINS MAY BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH, STUDY SAYS." This is the most amazing yet of those headlines that just make you want to eat a bag of steak fat in despair. What the hell's next? "Captain Morgan Spiced Rum 'Safer Than Water,' Say Docs" or "Surgeon-General: Cut Down on Leafy Greens"?

You're on your own, kids. Pay attention to the way your body reacts to certain ingestibles, and go with the ones that make it feel good. (Be careful about intoxicants, which tend to feel very bad in the long run, or at least the morning after.)

"I DO NOT THINK ABOUT THINGS I DO NOT THINK ABOUT." What the hell? Jonah Goldberg today: "Bush spends too much money. Period. This is one of the downsides of so-called compassionate conservatism... I think Bush is a good president and I think he's a conservative president. But he is also a big government president in many respects. There's less of a contradiction there than some think, by the way, but that's a conversation for another day."

I guess this is how JG gets himself to write those long, horrible columns -- he makes a patently ridiculous statement, then spends 2000 words trying to make it sound sensible.

It does look to me, more every day, that the only thing holding the movement together these days is a lust for power (and, in Goldberg's case, high-calorie snack food). I know that's a common, even cheap charge, but really, what the hell do they believe in? Fiscal restraint? Please. Social policy? Yeah, they're active -- that Partial-Birth Abortion Ban will save dozens of potential lives. I guess you could put them down as in favor of "helping people." As long as they live in other countries. And who even believes them in that regard?

They can't even agree on traditional conservative rallying points, such as the persecution of homosexuals. Oh, tax cuts. They like tax cuts. And choc-o-mut ice creams.

I guess it's really all about making snotty comments about Frenchmen and Hillary Clinton. Well, there are worse ways to make a living.

PROPOSING AN AMENDMENT. Administration judicial appointee Bill Pryor has called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of the history of constitutional law" which has "led to the slaughter of millions of unborn children," among other ripe opinions. (Orrin Hatch praises Pryor as "open and honest in his political beliefs.") The Democrats, naturally, resist and refuse.

Good for them. But their struggle with Pryor and other such operatives is getting old. Not "old" in the sense of unfashionableness, but in the clinical sense; the Dems are not, to state the obvious, a font of legislative vigor; the center cannot hold, and that is probably what Bush is counting on.

It is worth noting that in the 91st Congress (1969-71), the earliest for which I can find an official resume, the lawmen received 134,464 executive nominations of all sorts, and left 666 unconfirmed, withdrawn, or "rejected" (a single nominee!), while the 105th Congress (1999-2000, and the last one that does not require downloading a damned PDF) considered 45,805, and left unconfirmed, withdrawn, or "returned to the White House" 1,972. Nixon in his first term lost less than one-half a percent of his noms, Clinton in his last lost a little over 4 percent, though he had sent only about a third as many contestants into that arena.

The current struggles threaten to set some kind of record. Given the chance of fatigue, might they not prove the worse course of action? (I say this as a rabid anti-Bushite, a defender of R v. W, and one who wishes Pryor sent with a hard kick from the bench presumptive to write Borkian jeremiads for the rest of his natural life.)

It may be getting on time for Congressional Dems to draw up a counter to the oft-threatened Human Life Amendment. We've relied on Roe and the 10th Amendment securely a while now, but Bush is busily sending redneck jurists crawling up the ass of the polity to roll them both back, and shows no sign of stopping. A filbuster or two laid low, a bad by-election here or there, and the jig is up.

Maybe we just ought to make it plain, and put it before the states, that reproductive rights are not the business of the U.S. Congress.

A strict-constructionist liberal might say that we have no business enumerating what the Constitution has already made plain. Perhaps, but the rights of black Americans, which might seem to an unbiased observer equally plain under the original Articles, eventually required the 13th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. That work is still not done, but would be a damned sight harder without them.

I know all the practical arguments against it, but our enemies are implaccable and, judging from their behavior in matters of both war and peace, utterly ruthless. If the elected members of the Democratic Party has doubts about the resolution of the people, let the people erase or confirm them. If they doubt their own ability to make their case, they really have no business representing their Party, or the devotion to liberty which is, as it was in Jefferson's time, its very reason for being.

Or, to put it in rankly partisan terms: looking for an issue? Here it is.

FURTHER ADVENTURES IN ANDYLAND. From the alternate universe of Andrew Sullivan:

One thing the former president understands is power, and he knew full well that the resignation of Howell Raines at the NYT could hurt Democrats. The news might not be spun as ruthlessly as in the past; the campaign against the Bush administration under the guise of news coverage might not be as relentless; and so, apparently, Clinton intervened. This story, Clinton reminds us, wasn't just about journalism. At a deeper level it was also about politics; and Clinton wanted to protect a huge victory that the left had won with Raines' advancement. He lost. Journalism won.

In other world news, Clinton gave a bum a quarter, thereby conspicuously working to undermine, in a manner unbefitting a former President, the economic programs of George W. Bush.

Look at this 2001 dispatch from Howard Kurtz, recalling Raines' management of the Times' editorial page: "Once Clinton was elected, Raines's editorial page hammered him on Whitewater and improper fundraising, and during the Monica Lewinsky investigation said the president had 'embarrassed the nation' and 'sent out federal employees to lie on his behalf." Clinton was convinced that Raines, as a fellow Southerner, resented his success... 'Bill Clinton probably hated the Times editorial page under Howell Raines more than any other person in the United States,' [Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism] says..."

Raines and Clinton, two Southerners of the liberal persuasion, might as easily trade ass-pats as smacks upside the head. Powerful people tend to do each other favors, like making a case to keep a pal from getting fired, despite their differences. This, we inhabitants of planet Earth knew.

Sullivan, however, portrays it as some kind of devil's bargain between evil Democrats. Of course, he's not always so suspicious. The shoveling of unprecedented power to rich media conglomerates by their operatives in Congress, for example, glides right past him.

OUTLAND. Jeez, just got this forwarded by a friend:

Dear Friends and Neighbors,This morning at 5AM a man on a mountain bike rushed up behind one of my neighbors, took out a gun, and using the gun, forced him into his OWN apartment. The man with the gun took all the cash in his apartment, credit cards and other small valuables... The man was described as being 18-23 years old, African American, wearing a white cap, and--obviously--on a mountain bike. In the past month alone, there have been multiple crimes in our neighborhood. A stabbing on Maujer street, 2 gunpoint muggings on Powers Street and another mugging on Jackson St. It seems that the suspects are using the Graham Avenue community as their target--they are coming from the southside part of the street... All occurred during dark hours, but at weird times. So again, keep your eyes open. If you have to travel early in the morning or late at night alone, take a cab have a buddy watch for you...

The neighborhood described is considered part of Williamsburg -- my neighborhood, an alleged hipster Valhalla -- but newbies only started pushing as far west as the aforementioned streets recently. Other than this anecdotal evidence, I have no idea what's going out there. None of the local rags have decent police blotters. I guess they wouldn't be compatible with the current real estate values.

When I first lived in this neck of the neighborhood more than ten years ago, it was pretty dangerous, but things cooled out over time. For how long, I'm wondering.

AH, HA HA HA. AH, HA HA HA HA. Ah, ha ha ha.

DOESN'T PHOTOGRAPH WELL. Kathryn Jean Lopez complains at The Corner:

Ok. So maybe I am obsessed with the Clintons. I'll consider the possibility. But what about news editors who stick Ashcroft looking evil pictures wherever they can?

Here is the picture that thus exercised her:



I admit it wouldn't win the AG a lot of dates, but really, are there many better pictures of him out there? Maybe the photo editors are just making the best of a bad situation. Actively ranting, Ashcroft is at least dramatic; but when he tries to pose, watch out.
For instance, here's his official photo at DOJ:



One of his eyes looks bigger than the other, and though he's obviously trying to project warmth, he still reminds me of a cop who's had a slow week and has just seen a half-pound of weed fall out of your backpack. You know, the look that says, coolly and confidently, "You're mine, meat!" And that's his official photo.

And when he smiles -- brrrrr:



Sorry, K-Lo, the photo editors just don't have much to work with here.

STYLE COUNTS! I never thought I would say anything nice about The American Conservative's Taki, but age has either mellowed me, left me senile, or made me more appreciative of the aging playboy's prose style. NRO's David Frum, about whom I still cannot imagine saying anything nice, has accused Taki of rude advances toward his wife, and a remark about Jews getting all the pretty girls. Taki rebuts:

The idea that I would say what he claims I said to a perfect stranger is preposterous. I have been brought up to act like a gentleman of the old school, and although I am a heavy drinker and an incorrigible womanizer, I would no more dream of “hitting” on a woman I just met than I would betray my country for profit. (Drunk or sober, my manners do not vary. I am of the aristocratic school of thought about women. One never makes a lady feel anything but one, and by lady I mean anyone female.)

"And by a lady I mean anyone female." Like his forthright admissions about himself, this is bracingly clear and correct. Paternalistic, perhaps, but at least he recognizes that his paternalism requires of him some generosity and tact. In my experience, most men who think they have an old-fashioned view of women have instead merely a grudge against them. Given Frum's obssessive demonizing of Hillary Clinton, he is a perfect example of that sort, and he would do well (but is unlikely) to adopt Taki's example.

While the petulant Greek's manners are, too often for my taste, a thin veneer under which his noxious bigotry remains clearly visible, I must say that here, at least, he has acquitted himself with such high style that I must applaud him.

AT THIS WRITING, The last three posts at The Corner are about Barbara Walters, Hillary Clinton, and Oliver Stone. Who says conservatives have no interest in culture?

CLINTON'S PENIS: EVEN GAY CONSERVATIVES DREAM OF IT. You can, if you've the belly for it, read Andrew Sullivan's long snarl against Hillary Clinton, in which he characterizes Monica Lewinsky as Bill Clinton's "latest victim." (Victim of what, one might ask? Well, Sullivan does refer to the former President' "sexual abuse" as if this were a proven charge rather than a pleasing fantasy for conservatives still obssessed with Clinton's cock. And everyone knows that Lewinsky at the time of their affair was only 23 years old -- well below the legal age of consent in whatever alternate universe Sullivan inhabits.)

Or you could just go back in time and listen to how Sullivan feels his own sex life is none of your business.

ARTIFACT AND FICTION. PBS ran the old WWII weeper Since You Went Away tonight. It's a very sweet megaproduction in the old style. I note with interest that David O. Sleznick has a writing credit. His official screen bibliography is limited, but we know that even without a byline he had strong ideas about what went into the films he produced. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the Selznick wanted to punctuate the burning of Manderley in Rebecca with a large, smokey "R" floating above the ruins. (Hitchcock sensibly refused.)

Anyway the pic is a honey. Claudette Colbert's husband goes off to war, is reported missing in action, and CC must guide their budding daughters through heartbreak and mild domestic comedy. The acting is terrific in that big Forties manner that is incomprehensible, I know, to non-fans. (Bogart translates well across the ages because of the cold sweat of existential dread clinging to all his performances, but to youngsters raised on today's far less effusive players, most antique movie stars might as well be the wolf that does "To Be Or Not To Be" and gets hit with tomatoes in that old Warner Brothers cartoon.) The girls alternate between noble restraint and bouts of hysteria that are still raw and disturbing even on TV -- on the big screen they must have really bludgeoned open the lachrymal floodgates. Robert Walker is a doomed young soldier -- funny how the stink of death clung to Walker, even when he was very young and squeaky-voiced and well before he drank himself to death. Old family friends Joseph Cotten and Monty Woolley stop by from time to time to cut the estrogen miasma. Toward the end Cotten even makes some wise-ass professions of love to Colbert that are forcibly steered clear of any discomforting suggestion that either may be seriously considering a romance should the old man's death be confirmed (Cotten is especially good at this -- I searched his eyes during this scene, and he allowed not one flicker of subtext to escape from them).

I must add that at one point Monty Woolley quotes Wordsworth, aptly and without attribution -- not because Selznick wanted people to think he wrote it, I'm sure, but because it was part of the cultural life of the time and if you didn't get it, you should really make a better effort to keep up. Who would do that today? Why not?

John Cromwell does a nice company-man job of directing -- he manages some bravura touches, usually involving a key character with her back turned to the camera -- and generally keeps the train on track. But even to those of us predisposed to give ourselves over to the sentiments, it's hard not to be aware of the salesmanship involved. Despite the core truth of the thing -- that war is hell on the loved ones at home, and the only useful response is faith in the glorious resolution -- we know that despair and discontent are not absent, but merely fended off. A few years later, when all the living were returned to their homes, The Best Years of Our Lives would blow the whistle. Of course that, too, was a stalwart Hollywood product, but I wonder if Dana Andrews sitting in that disused cockpit didn't have as much to do with America's rude, postwar awakening from idealism as Brando on his motorcycle.

On one level, maybe the primary one, Since You Went Away is uplift, and hence propaganda, however kindly meant. Still I enjoyed it, was moved by it, and not only because the war in question was the last one to which I can give unqualified support. Don't tell anyone (I mean, who reads this, anyway) but every sneering and cynical impulse I have toward the manipulation of patriotism is shadowed by affection for the genuine article to which it refers, and the noble feelings it stirs, however shabby the pretenses. The fellow-feeling of American citizens, to the extent that it still exists, is beautiful and very human -- I wish it were still our birthright, and not a privilege granted upon favorable consideration of loyalty test results. Once upon a time it was possible even for artists to share in it, without having to announce or even have reservations and qualifications. I love "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Young Mr. Lincoln and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When George Bush lands on an aircraft carrier and talks about America, however, I want to throw up.

I came away from tonight's artifact of the old America grateful that even its memory exists, because to remember it is to hold hope, however tenuously, that it may again be realized. But, in the immortal words of Johnny Thunders, you can't put your arms around a memory.

A BRIEF RESPITE FROM INCOHERENT SNARLS. Boy that's some crabby posting I've been doing. Let us turn to happier subjects. There was a short break in the dismal weather that happily conincided with my bike-ride to the teaching job. The streets were nearly empty, the morning sun was cool and kind, and I had enough time to tool around Fort Greene and scope the pretty buildings around its park. Some of the older structures appear to be of wood, and a few have columned porticos. All the scene needed was a fat guy on a porch, sprawled in a rattan chair, shirt pure white, suspenders unsnapped, the cuffs of his pants riding up above the sock-line, cooling himself with a broad paper fan advertising CARSON'S FUNERAL HOME and havin' a Pepsi. Turn a corner, of course, and it's all gas stations and chicken joints. My City is so beautiful sometimes.

Last night I even had a satisfying experience at an art gallery. Pierogi 2000 has an installation by Brian Dewan, a recreated 50s-vintage elementary school classroom with authentic wooden desks, chalkboards, boxy PA speakers and clock, and American flag. Mark Newgarten showed period educational films, blessedly without comment, and Dewan ran a filmstrip of his own devising, a garbled fable concerning a hen and a rooster and their multispecied friends, artful and ludicrous and touching all at once. I could have stood a little more of this and a little less of that, but it's so rare nowadays when the art boys actually come across that I have to stand up and cheer. The exhibition and related shows run through the 23rd.

Coffee break over; everyone back on your heads!

WTF? Dunno how it'll be when you look in, but at the moment Blogger seems only to be showing my archives from March -- removing from public view thousands of words of deathless prose. I'll see what I can do to redress this offense against literature. Not much, I guessing.

UPDATE. All fixed. If this keeps up I may have to adopt some faith in humanity. Provisionally.

HIS OWN PETARD. Go look, if your breakfast has settled sufficiently, at the loathsome Lileks site, and read the Fark commentary he makes sport of, and read Lileks' crabby-suburban-dad commentary, and tell me, am I crazy -- well, nevermind, I am crazy ; substitute, am I wrong -- or is his argument (such as it is) feeble on its own terms? His target (a Canuck who did some actually reporting, as opposed to lengthy jeremiads interrupted by cute kiddy anecdotes, then went into PR, then took a pay cut to get back into the journalistic game) makes a lot more sense than he does. Lileks' case consists mainly of sneers. "All hail the 10,000 foot view!" he jibes. "From there everything looks so green and lovely. From this Olympian perspective, helping the homeless is more imporant than worrying about property taxes." Taken from the crabgrass POV, any attempt at perspective will of course seem ridiculous -- don't those Grubstreeters understand that I have a cute little girl to ferry around to malls, and that it's hard enough explaining my video games and Simpsons DVDs to her without having a filthy unemployed guy with a garbage bag on his head show up to blow my whole paternal trip?

How did we breed this hellspawn anyway? Are there nuclear reactors near Minneapolis? Or does the wind whistling through the wheat or corn or soybeanstalks or whatever the fuck they raise out there stir madness in their souls?