DEFINING OPPRESSION DOWN. Speaking of which, if you read conservative stuff at all, every so often you'll see a story similar to this one from today's NRO:

A few days after my [anti-affirmative action] editorial appeared, a college administrator whom I scarcely recognized approached me in the campus coffee shop. "Are you Gabe Neville?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, not sure why he was asking.

"Having identified me, he glanced furtively around and said, "Good editorial" — and quickly walked away. I never spoke with him again.

...The man was scared. A man like that, an employee without the protection of tenure, wasn't allowed to have opinions of his own.

I'm always reading in such venues about how terrified people are to have, or even approve, "politically incorrect" opinions. Apparently, America is like old Soviet Russia, where all true hearts fear the finger of the informer.

There may be some percentage in looking like a liberal on college campuses -- where it may also be prudent not to criticize the school's basketball team or the head cheerleader's appearance. But where else?

Stop, drop, and look around: conservatives literally rule our politics. No one's throwing rocks and bottles at Bush. Truly suppressed political movements are usually accompanied by legally arbitrary detentions, outlawing of political activity, etc. That sure isn't happening to these guys.

Oppression has been defined down, it seems, for conservatives. If Miguel Estrada gets filibustered, in the conservative imagination it's because "No Conservatives Need Apply" for work from bigoted Democrats. Preferring Darwin's Origin of Species to the Book of Genesis as a paleontology text means liberals "want everyone to tolerate their liberal ideas but have no tolerance for others." And, of course, if you support gay rights, be prepared to hear about "the victimization of evangelical Christians by a hostile secular culture."

It's all a tonic for the troops, I guess -- after all, nothing gets an American up off his duff better'n that someone letting him know he's been getting a raw deal, see? So, rather than let the young cons lay back and watch the Republican-run economy and polity implode, the wise ones tell them martyrdom stories to build fires of righteousness in their hearts.

WHINERS. Conservatives are an odd lot. They run the country, and seem at their pep rallies, at least, to know it, high-fiving and lustily proclaiming, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." For a winning team, though, they do a surprising amount of whining.

Yesterday's Supreme Court comments make good examples, but I must share with you this whinge from Keith Burgess-Jackson at the library of rejected thesis drafts known as Tech Central Station:

"...instead of engaging conservatives, liberals seek to crush them. It is as if conservatives are unworthy of being taken seriously. It is as if they are less than human."

Given the power disparity between the two groups, it is as if Burgess-Jackson were accusing cockroaches of plotting to send him to the ovens.

B-J has plenty of shoulders to cry on. One such is James Lileks, the cornpone vendor from Minnesota who amuses us with anecdotes about his widdle girl Gnat and lurid fantasies about Michael Moore's painful, fecally-explicit death. So Lileks likes to play rough -- "Fisking" and all that. But get a load of how he reacts when someone takes a swipe at him:

My God, people can be vile. I hate to realize sometimes how naive I can be, how I can still be surprised at someone’s ability to put the screws to their fellow man -- er, person -- for reasons so petty you couldn’t find them with an electron microscope. One silly minor person sets her jaw, decides to show someone what’s what, and the effect cascades through the lives of half a dozen other people.

But you know what they say: everytime a door closes, another one opens. So make sure when you close it, your tormentor’s foot is caught twixt door and frame. And slam it shut. Hard.

I have no idea what the beef is -- and I suppose it would be unkind, in a Lileksian way, to speculate (so unfair that I just now deleted a mean gag relating to it -- oh, by the way, UPDATE) -- but Jesus, what a whiner.

Now, I whine too. Oh boy, do I whine. But I'm one of those evil, dehumanizing liberals -- it's in character for me to whine. (And to listen to NPR, drive a Volvo, and murder unborn babies.) Lileks, on the other hand, is impeccably right-wing, and has a fine house, a nice family, a cushy gig, a loyal dog. One would expect him to look trouble in the eye with the same amused glimmer that graces the orbs of Rumsfield and Cheney when some idiot appears to expect a straight answer from them. Yet here he is, to borrow an apt phrase from one of Mike Tyson's handlers, jumping around like a little bitch.

Is that what success is like? Thank God I'm a failure!

RACE HUSTLERS. The recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action sure look like a conservative gain to me -- those guys hate diversity politics, and Gratz at least should make undergraduate programs a little less, um, diverse. Yet prominent righties are (almost literally) spitting mad at Sandra Day O'Connor for the milder Grutter decision.

"Rank perversion," says Peter Kirsanow. He argues that "while the immediate practical effect may be negligible, the long-term social cost will be pronounced." How? "It has consigned at least one more generation of minorities to hard labor under the stigma of perceived incompetency." His concern for those of his fellow African-Americans who have not been muscled onto a Federal Commission is touching. But I wonder which of the following a marginal, black college applicant would prefer: a college education with stigma, or the opportunity to write "LAST GRADE ATTENDED: 12" on job applications without stigma?

David Frum mourns "the determination of elite schools to practice racial preferences either directly or through sneaky subterfuges." Curse those elite schools! On the other hand, I imagine if they were elite country clubs, Frum might be defending them from governmental intrusion.

You can actually see beads of sweat on John Podhoretz' prose: "Sandra Day O'Connor doesn't quite understand what it means to hold a thought in her head for more than 15 seconds," he raves. "Embarrassed themselves in perpetuity... judicial cowardice... racial condescension." And, of course, the old all-ya-gotta-do-is-be-black argument: "At state colleges and law schools, the Supreme Court says, all you need to get a leg up is a non-Caucasian (and non-Asian) skin tone."

Yeesh. Does Podhoretz even know what he sounds like? Or does he know and feel good about it, believing himself bravely "politically incorrect"?

Actually, I'm beginning to think that these guys have no strong Constitutional feelings about affirmative action at all. Race is a hot-button issue, and everyone knows how to win Republican votes on that score -- when Supreme Court no kill quotas, Hulk smash!

God knows how the black rightists work up the requisite fury. Kirsanow said last year that he foresaw a "groundswell of opinion" favoring internment camps for all Arab-Americans if any more terrorist attacks took place in America -- so maybe he thinks America is race-mad (a not unfounded conclusion), and may hope, by disassociating his people from despised preferences, to shield them from the volatile animosity of crackerdom.

For the white guys, I suppose it's a lot simpler.

GEORGE AXELROD. I had no idea he was still alive, or I would have sent a fan letter before he died. Now that the screenwriter/director is gone, I'll tell you why I would have.

There's a strain in American film that has been too little examined. When we think of sex-comedy movies, we tend to think of classy, wised-up offerings like those of Preston Struges or Ernst Lubitsch. These guys couldn't show a lot of skin or use dirty words, but their characters obviously heard the old goat-song and were motivated by it to do some wacky things. A celibate professor might put a shady dame up in his sanctum sanctorum, for example, if her gams were appealing. There was a shared perception among audience and moviemaker alike that the power of sexual attraction was the topic (Topic A, Sturges used to call it) that had motivated comedy from the dawn of dramaturgy.

But in the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s, stateside sex comedies took on a deciedly neurotic aspect. I'll spare you the convoluted social and aesthetic bloodlines, but the short version might go like this: as American sexual mores began to loosen, popular artists felt the pull and felt compelled to go with it. Of course, to go all the way with it would have been too much for everyone concerned -- it's one thing for some garretted bohemian to tear the frilly nightdress off the American libido, but makers of fun entertainments for the masses didn't want to live in garrets (though they might go to parties in them) -- they wanted to stay popular.

Still, everybody knew the jig was up -- the country was rich and leisured, and not everyone was passing their suburban evenings with mah jong and Uncle Miltie. Eventually you couldn't not talk about sex, but you couldn't tell all you knew, either.

This made for what we might charitably call creative tension. Moviemakers began pushing the envelope, as we now say, but they also had to pay obesiance to the power of suppression -- the newly-hip audience may have been making new demands, but the Hayes Code was still making its old ones. So we started getting Ross Hunter movies, Good Neighbor Sam, Kiss Me, Stupid, A Guide for the Married Man, Sex and the Single Girl, Under the Yum Yum Tree, etc. -- pictures in which sex was hyped up to an alarming degree. The pursuit of partners in these pictures seems almost panic-stricken. The pull of lust was shown, not as a little spark that made the world go round, but as a tornado that blew men around like uprooted trees. Still, conventional morality was more or less restored by the end of each -- albeit a little the worse for wear.

It may be said that Axelrod was one of the founding fathers of the neurotic sex comedy. The Seven Year Itch, his first hit, was mainly about a middle-class guy ineptly trying to screw his neighbor. As the neighbor was Marilyn Monroe, not much explanation was required. In the Billy Wilder film version, made in 1955, the guy doesn't go through with it -- though in Axelrod's original Broadway play, he did. Axelrod reportedly resented this modification. Of course the play couldn't be filmed as it was. But something was eating at Axelrod. There was a wrecker in him, albeit one domesticated by an aversion to garrets.

Axelrod went west and wrote, among other films, Goodbye Charlie and How to Murder Your Wife. These pictures are at times literally astonishing -- not good, just astonishing. The men in them seem, for the most part, crazed with lust, yet highly uncomfortable with its consequences. Charlie, in which a deceased womanizer comes back to earth as Debbie Reynolds and his old pal falls in love with him/her, would give Sigmund Freud nightmares. And the courtroom scene in How To Murder Your Wife whips the vague resentments males feel toward the restrictions of marriage and social status into a delirious rage -- climaxing with Jack Lemmon convincing the male jurors that any man would kill to be freed from his marital chains. Maybe the audience was supposed to take all this as good-humored ribbing between the sexes, but my nostrils detect a whiff of gasoline and old rags when I watch them.

Axelrod did some fine things -- The Manichurian Candidate among them -- but for me his apotheosis is Lord Love a Duck. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and it failed miserably at the box office. The style is a kind of SoCal magic realism, in which the erotically compelled characters of his earlier work become almost literal automatons, mouthing conformist platitudes between eye-rolling bouts of sexual frenzy. Above all this is Roddy McDowell (!) as a living imp of the perverse -- but a curiously unsexed one. He obsesses on a shallow but ambitious California teenager played by Tuesday Weld (!), but he doesn't seem to want to fuck her -- merely to amuse and enable her with his magical power to grant all her wishes. At first he vicariously enjoys her rakette's progress through the social gauntlet of suburban life. Weld drives men literally mad, knows it, and uses it. Her very presence causes her high school principal (Harvey Korman) to devour pencils; she even vamps her estranged father, in one thoroughly unwholesome sequence, so that he'll buy her the multiple sweaters she needs to join the cool girls of the school.

McDowell hates all these people, and happily smooths her path, even arranging an advantageous marriage for her to a thoroughly hypocritical square he detests. But then he starts to crack. He slowly destroys the square, and then decides this isn't a large enough gesture of contempt -- and mows down all his adversaries by running a bulldozer into the high school graduation. The story ends with McDowell in prison, proclaiming his love for Weld -- who goes on to become a movie star.

Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.

"PRETEND YOU LIVE IN AMERICA." Jimmy Breslin's always worth reading, seldom more so than in this column, in which the old guy looks at the Iyman Faris case and, not being properly coached in the new realities, calls it for what it is:

Friday, the newspapers and television reported the following matter with no anger or effort to do anything other than serve as stenographers for the government:

On March 1, give or take a day, in Columbus, Ohio, the FBI arrested an American citizen they say is Iyman Faris. There wasn't a word uttered. He vanished. No lawyer was notified. He made no phone calls and wrote no postcards or letters.

He was a United States citizen who disappeared without a trace into a secret metal world...

They held him secretly in an iron world for the next six weeks. This is plenty of time to hand out giant beatings. Oh, yes, don't gasp. If cops are performing a Fascist act, then always suspect them of acting like Fascists. They have fun beating people up.

In mid-April, again in deep secrecy, the government says Faris was allowed to plead guilty to plotting to pull down or blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. He was in a sealed Virginia federal courtroom. If he had a lawyer, that was some lawyer.

After that, he was sentenced. We don't know what the sentence was because it is sealed.

I don't know what Faris looks like or sounds like or what he thinks and what he was doing. He could be the worst. I don't know. Prove he wanted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and let him paste a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cell wall for inspiration over the next half a century. But first bring him into open court and try him. Pretend you live in America. Even pick a jury...

Hacks may whinge at the archaism of his style, but Breslin on his worst day wipes the floor with their candy asses every time. And reason isn't too technical. It's because Breslin knows what he sees, and tells us. None of this prevaricating horseshit for him. Things either add up or they don't.

This doesn't add up. And he's right, not enough reporters have said so. When Breslin stops doing this gig, we'll all be a lot closer to mushroom status.

A METHOD TO HIS DUMBNESS. While I do enjoy those pictures of Bush falling off a Segway, I also wonder if we aren't being conned.

The Village Voice seems to think Bush could get impeached for lying about WMD in Iraq (found via WTF Is It Now? which seems to agree). I think that's far-fetched, but our President, not known especially for personal valor, might be feeling a little nervous about it.

So maybe Bush is trying to revive and exploit that perception of himself which his spin doctors once labored so valiantly to decommission: the perception that Bush is a dumbass.

While falling off a supposedly un-fall-offable Segway is more on the clumsy than the stupid tip, it must be remembered that stupidity and clumsiness are often conjoined in the minds of the masses (cf. Inspector Clouseau, Gerald Ford). Plus, Bush may have wanted to kick off Operation Lookame Imadumbass with a bold physical schtick, as most of his constituents are themselves too poorly educated to notice even his most egregiously deformed syntax and reasoning.

If Operation Lookame Imadumbass is a success, the Democrats can raise as many Bills of Impeachment as they like. By then Bush will be walking around dressed like Jethro Bodine, with one tooth blacked out perhaps, and answering all questions by hollering "How the HAAAIL am I spozed to know? AH'M A DUMBASS!" and waving his arms spastically. He can then beg off charges on the grounds of mental incapacity.

Hell, it worked for Reagan.

SEND MONEY, THEY'RE STARVING -- FOR ATTENTION! The NRO pledge drive must be doing really badly. The Corner hasn't been this nuts since the war. Now they're going on about Keynes being gay. Derbyshire calls him "gay as a convention of hairdressers," observes, "'In the long run we're all dead' -- That is not the kind of thing a family man would say," and asks his readers for more info on Keynes' sex life. Jonah Goldberg adds, "The fact that Keynes was gay might be relevant as to why he held the views he did." Well, you can't say they're always thinking Clinton's cock, anyway.

Also, Goldberg picks up the Ole Perfesser's article-style blogroll at TCS (synopsis: Me and my buddies rock. Liberals are stupid and cowardly. Gee, that Andrew Sullivan sure can write) and asks why leftists (as he and Reynolds allege) don't sign their blog writings. Given the quality of what Goldberg churns out, I could as well ask why he does sign his.

ANOTHER CONTESTANT IN THE WORST-WMD-EXCUSE CONTEST. Richard Brookhiser:

What if Werner von Braun had told us after V-E Day that, yes, in theory it would have been nice to have an A-bomb, and that Heisenberg and his crowd had looked into the subject -- but, given the intellectual and logistical obstacles, the project had simply been abandoned?

Yeah, dude, what if? What if Hitler had invaded, say, only Lichtenstein instead of several European countries -- or if Saddam Hussein were at any time in his reign capable of lobbing missles any further than a few hundred miles (and if any of those missles were able to do any serious damage)?

Then Brookhiser's amazing historical non-sequitur would still make no fucking sense.

The rest of the column is just as bad.

DERB SNAPS! As aforementioned, the NRO kids have been playing it cute during pledge drive. Maybe they're not bringing in enough money, because strain is beginning to show. Behold John Derbyshire:

69-year-old Harry Hammond, arrested last year in England and fined over $1,000 for holding up a placard that said: STOP IMMORALITY. STOP HOMOSEXUALITY. STOP LESBIANISM I am willing to bet that a poll of homosexuals would show a majority believing that this prosecution was right and proper--probably, in fact, a majority feeling that Mr Hammond got off too lightly. Homosexual activists will stop at nothing to shut down all discussion of, and objection to, their "lifestyle." They do not want mere tolerance or grudging acceptance: they want whole-hearted approval, with the silencing, by force of law, of anyone who does not approve.

One awaits sourcing from Derbyshire, though of course without holding one's breath.

If you want more anti-gay ravings, you can go to the lead-lined fart chamber in which they keep David Frum.

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.