S.W.A.T. THE MOVIE. This looks like a new low. What's next? Michael Douglas in "Matlock"?

THE TEDIOUSNESS OF TRAITOR-BAITING. Today's Richard Brookhiser column is as usual mostly gobbledegook, especially in the steam-losing last laps, but it does have a few instructive passages. One may even be instructive in a way intended by its author. It regards the good showing by Howard Dean in the recent MoveOn.org "primary," and after a few expectedly dismissive comments, asks:

Howard Dean may be a lightning bug, a bright but short-lived creature of the summer before election year. But suppose he is a portent? Barry Goldwater, the conservative conviction candidate of the early 1960’s, won his nomination in 1964, and went on to carry only six states. But he transformed the Republican Party for our lifetime. After Bill Clinton’s mini-issues and feints to the right, progressive Democrats wonder when they will get their own Goldwater. Howard Dean may be the great id of his party, rising in rebellion against its shifty Arkansas super-ego.

This may be Brookhiser's attempt at a new poison meme for Democrats: if Dean is Goldwater, he must lose as Goldwater lost -- and if Dean by some miracle takes the nomination, this only proves the point, and precertifies his failure.

But Dean-watching righties have heretofore been broadcasting a different idea -- that of Dean as McGovern. Bruce Bartlett practically starts his D-as-McG tract by stating that "Frankly, I don’t see any way that [Bush]can be beaten by any Democrat now in the field" and "I think most Democrats know this... [so] If Democrats are going down in flames anyway, the base figures that they might as well do so behind someone who speaks to their soul, rather than some pale imitation."

This idea similarly preordains defeat -- indeed, willful defeat. (Maybe these guys have been comparing Democrats to the Taliban for so long that they imagine them capable of suicide-bomb candidacies.)

But the difference in Brookhiser's Goldwater idea is that the noble Barry is generally thought to be the Godfather of the current radical-right Republican Party -- out of the ashes of 1964, goes that story, came Reagan, Falwell, and other such keepers of the flim-flam. Goldwater's losing battle, unlike McGovern's, presaged a successful war. So this is a new one: Dean as the future of the Party, rather than an annoying historic hiccup.

Could it be? Dean's Internet fundraising is impressive. But remember Jerry Brown? Back in the 1992 Time called him a "1-800 Pound Gorilla" because he kept yelling out his donation digits on TV and getting campaign bucks for his Presidential run that way. It was supposed to herald a new age in the way campaigns were financed.

Today Brown is cooling his national ambitions as the Mayor of Oakland, CA, McCain-Feingold is in the middle of possibly fatal judicial review, and both parties are even more beholden to special interests than they were eleven years ago. Whatever the Internet-changes-everything crowd may think, Dean's PayPals aren't likely to transfigure anything.

As to Dean himself, well, that's another story. I can't say I'm surprised by his popularity. What he's saying isn't so far out. Some loud voices have been making it seem so (no link needed -- just read my archives!), but I suspect their influence is dwindling.

In fact, let me go so far as to say that we may have reached a critical mass of bullshit -- a moment when so much nonsense has been ingested by the average American that, nonsense-tolerant as he may be, he grows bored enough with the current flavor to entertain alternatives. Iraq is in disarray and the economy is in the toilet -- most of the stories used by Administration supporters to misdirect us from these facts are wearing thin. And look how fast it happened! When the aforelinked Daniel Pipes screed, "Why the Left Loves Osama (And Saddam)," first ran in March, it was very much of a piece with all the other GOP traitor-baiting sideshows surrounding World War Whatever -- now it seems a quaint relic of a darker, dumber time.

Am I a touch Pollyannaish? Consider this other passage from Brookhiser as he considers Dean's anti-war cred:

Mr. Dean tells the Democratic left what it wants to hear -- fear, carping and doubt.... The truth is, we knew the truth about Saddam’s nature; the deadly flailings of his diehards is another facet of that truth, along with oppression, terror and war... Given Mr. Dean’s ignorance of these truths, what weight can we possibly assign to his belief that it’s "a good thing to have Saddam gone"? If we had let Howard Dean lead the search for the facts, Kofi Annan would still be doing shuttle diplomacy in Baghdad...

Does this not seem a little... familiar? A tad tired? A hint desperate?

NOTHING MATTERS AND SO WHAT IF IT DID. Jonah Goldberg calls Andrew Sullivan on an alleged inconsistency.

An NRO reader writes: "What I don't understand is why it matters to you that Sullivan's argument does not clarify the principle at stake. You have written extensively about the forgivability of inconsistency in argument and the usefulness of hypocrisy in public policy. Why can't Sullivan appeal to these things as well?"

Goldberg replies, "...I am judging him by his standards not my own. 2) I've never said that consistency is a useless concept or that inconsistency is necessarily preferable to consistency. Rather, I've said it depends on the circumstances. 3) Even when I've taken the position that inconsistency can be forgiven, I've also argued that inconsistency is certainly fair game for debate and discussion. It would be nuts of me to promote a position which forced me to applaud people for being inconsistent. I'll stop there."

I don't see how Goldberg's Rules of Order reduces to anything more exalted than this: I make the rules up, and apply or disallow them as I see fit.

Given with the current Administration's "la-la-I-can't-hear-you" approach to the WMD question, and the recent Volokhian deconstruction of Dick Cheney, I am beginning to think that power has affected American conservatives adversely. Are they, as one says, drunk with power? Well, in months past they seemed so, roaring and whooping about the Iraqi bonfire. But they are less cheerful now -- hungover, perhaps, or in that cold-grey-dawn stage of drunkenness that infuses any but the most boorish consciousness with existential confusion.

These guys have been pretending for so long -- about the war, about the economy, about the nature of their fellow-citizens -- that they have forgotten what reality is. It was weird enough when they told us that it didn't matter whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- all the while scouring every lead for proof that he did -- but when they begin to insist, as Volokh does, that they didn't absolutely positively say that Hussein had these weapons, we are experiencing a flight from reality resembling, in its disorderliness and desperation, Bonaparte's retreat from Russia.

Now the U.S. Government has, per Radio Free Europe (!), "suspended military assistance to more than 30 nations which have failed thus far or have refused to sign agreements with the U.S. giving Americans immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court..." International justice, it would seem, is only legitimate when pursued by U.S. military invasion.

And these guys are always talking about values.

EVEN WHEN HE'S RIGHT HE'S WRONG. You know anyone like that? People who, even when they occasionally wander over to the right side on an argument, have such bogus reasons for doing so that you can't even agree with them without wincing?


Here's Mickey Kaus on the Clinton Boom versus the Reagan Boom (a concern brought up by this Times item):

In Sunday's N.Y. Post, Rich Lowry correctly notes that the sharply rising income share of the 400 richest Americans--implicitly lamented in David Cay Johnston's latest NYT piece--occurred on Bill Clinton's watch. Why didn't Democrats denounce the Clinton years as a "Decade of Greed," Lowry asks?... Someone should defend the Clinton Boom, precisely on the grounds that '90s income inequality was relatively benign compared with '80s income inequality... The basic argument: Most of the tech geeks and stock traders of the 90s couldn't possibly have thought they were better than the non-rich -- they had so obviously lucked out into a windfall... Secondary argument: In the Clinton boom, unlike in the Reagan boom, incomes at the bottom also rose quite quickly...

Only in the world of Mickey "But Is It Good for the Welfare Reformers?" Kaus would the spiritual life of Silicon Valley schnooks constitute a more powerful defense of the Clinton boom than the fact that poor people also got a little more money from it.

WORTHY OF DERRIDA. It is refreshing to see conservatives standing up and saying, now hold on, there may be more to this than meets the eye -- let us eschew the "gotcha" politics of easy sound-bytes, and try to divine what this misunderstood fellow meant.

After all, they have in the past been quick to willfully misunderstand their enemies, and to run with the results -- as with their deliberate and shameful garbling of Paul Begala's "Red State - Blue State" comments, which remain a Republican bloody shirt to this day.

So today it was sweet to see Eugene Volokh and Andrew Sullivan attempting to explain Dick Cheney in context. When Cheney asserted that Iraq had nuclear weapons, he "misspoke," Volokh surmises. (The linguistic outrage "misspoke" is attributed to former Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, and its usage here may indicate that Volokh is showing off for the cognoscenti in the audience.) To prove this, he contextualizes Cheney's nuclear weapons statement with a bunch of Cheney statements that were almost about nuclear weapons -- "pursuit of nuclear weapons," "until he acquires nuclear weapons," etc. "He must have made a slip of the sort that people often make when they're in an extemporaneous conversation," concludes Volokh.

It does not occur to Volokh -- at least not on the page -- that there are many more uncharitable explanations for not keeping one's story straight. But who are we to split hairs? Leave it to bludgeon-brained Sullivan to forthRightly explain the import of Volokh's linguistic forensics: "The far Left, still desperate to undermine this administration and retroactively discredit the war of Iraqi liberation, is merely digging a bigger and bigger hole for itself."

Orwell was an amateur.

MOVIE NIGHT. I resigned myself to clean my place up for a family visit, but then I turned on the tube and now the place just won't be up to code. First, they had Visconti's The Damned. How'd I miss it before? It's like Shakespeare with all the poetry in your eyes. I suppose you could fault LV for letting some individual members of the damned Essenbecks get lost for a little too long, but that's all to one side when the true vice-grip of tragedy bites so hard. Then, hey! Duel in the Sun on PBS, every bit as silly as its reputation, but good fun all around -- especially when Walter Huston forces a dusky, blanket-clad Jennifer Jones (baring a lot of leg) to kneel with his hand in her hair. Boy, they knew how to make crap in those days. And now there's San Francisco with crackling Anita Loos dialogue -- and a religious angle, yet!

These movies were made between the early Thirties and 1969. Well, that speaks badly for my contemporaneity, or for movies today, depending on how you look at it.

DEMOCRACY! POPPERS! SEXY! A quick post-Lawrence troll of the conservative sites shows that, while outright anti-homosexual raving is limited, nearly every one of these guys is unhappy with a decision that, it would appear, has killed legal persecution of gay sex. Andrew Sullivan, of course, is delighted, and the normally awful Instapundit can't quite work up any of those offensive cavils which usually disfigure his other too-rare moments of sanity, but elsewise the rightists feel compelled to grumble at least a little about it.

OpinionJournal, for example, compares Lawrence to Roe v. Wade -- meaning, in the secret language of the more urbane cons who there predominate, that whatever social benefit derives from the decision is far outweighed by the judicial overreach.

If you're gay or have any friends who are gay, can you possible go for the idea that it would have been better to keep your friends and lovers under a legal shadow till such time as a bunch of dumbass cracker legislators decide to update their prejudices?

I'm willing to entertain the idea that most modern conservatives aren't outright bigots, but if they feel so little enthusiasm for the legal liberation of gay people that they must brood and sulk through an actual stateside "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" moment, how can I believe them when tell me how passionately they care about the Iraqi people -- or anyone else?

AND ANOTHER THING... Victor Davis Hanson today comes out shaking the same fist as usual at Old Europe (which collectively suffers, in his fevered imagination, from "post-Cold War teenager syndrome") and all Arabs everywhere. But toward essay's end, he finds a new and heretofore unsuspected enemy -- the Mexicans:

And if one wishes to find real anti-Americanism, there is no need to go to Brussels or Damascus. Simply peruse the Mexico City newspapers, read what Mr. Fox says to non-Americans, or listen carefully to la Raza (a blatantly racist term analogous to the old German concept of a pure Volk) dogma in the southwest. Papers in Mexico often mirror those in the Arab world — blaming the United States for Mexico City's own failure to address self-created pathologies...

One wonders why Hanson does not devote his energies to support of the U.S. space program. Clearly Americans are too good for the planet.

What a sour way to look at things -- believing that everything you do is wonderful, and that everyone should love you for it, and that those who don't are just fools requiring correction ("r" rolled as Grady does in the film of The Shining). I slip into that kind of thinking myself sometimes -- often enough that I have to pay close attention to the tendency, lest I become too moody and anti-social. But I know there's something wrong with feeling that way -- and (thankfully for all concerned, I guess) I don't have the ear of a suggestible President.

MY BLOOD RUNS COLD. Been reading Scalia's dissent on today's decision. Hair-raising. At one point he lists high-court decisions that relied upon Bowers for guidance:

It seems to me that the "societal reliance" on the principles confirmed in Bowers and discarded today has been overwhelming... See, e.g., Williams v. Pryor, 240 F. 3d 944, 949 (CA11 2001) (citing Bowers in upholding Alabama's prohibition on the sale of sex toys...)... Milner v. Apfel, 148 F. 3d 812, 814 (CA7 1998) (citing Bowers for the proposition that "[l]egislatures are permitted to legislate with regard to morality . . . rather than confined to preventing demonstrable harms"); Holmes v. California Army National Guard 124 F. 3d 1126, 1136 (CA9 1997) (relying on Bowers in upholding the federal statute and regulations banning from military service those who engage in homosexual conduct); Owens v. State, 352 Md. 663, 683, 724 A. 2d 43, 53 (1999) (relying on Bowers in holding that "a person has no constitutional right to engage in sexual intercourse, at least outside of marriage"); Sherman v. Henry, 928 S. W. 2d 464, 469, 473 (Tex. 1996) (relying on Bowers in rejecting a claimed constitutional right to commit adultery). We ourselves relied extensively on Bowers when we concluded, in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U. S. 560, 569 (1991), that Indiana's public indecency statute furthered "a substantial government interest in protecting order and morality, ibid., (plurality opinion); see also id., at 575 (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment). State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision...

And he says it like that's a bad thing.

Elsewhere, Scalia says "there is no right to 'liberty' under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim." His conclusion is just -- brrrrrrr.

About what goes on in George W. Bush's brain, we can only speculate, protected as that rat's-nest is by enablers and publicists. But Scalia's in a different line of work, and on his job he can let the slimey string all the way out. And my blood runs cold to think that a freedom-hating scumbag like this is placed so high in the government of my country.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Who wouldn't be happy about this? Well, let's not go there (and I mean that literally)...

I do note with interest that Justice Thomas' fence-straddle -- voting with the minority, but going out of his way to express disdain for regulation of "noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult" -- achieves its probable objective of playing both ends against the middle, PR-wise. Both Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan use Thomas as an exemplar of conservative tolerance -- even though he voted to uphold Bowers v. Hardwick. Talk about having it both ways!

Well, you know what; let Sullivan have it any way he wants -- this is a big day for him, and though I think he's an asshole, this is one victory I'm happy to see him celebrate.

THINKING IT THROUGH. The mystery of Lileks is solved: his wife lost her job. As one who has suffered the vagaries of the job market, I sympathize. It must make it that much harder for him that he has that large, comfortable house to maintain. And all the latest Mac gear, and a great home entertainment center. It'll be hard keeping all that together on one nationally-syndicated columnist's salary...

On second thought, fuck that asshole.

Favorite lines: "The woman who comes in once a week to do the woodwork: she’s hosed. The guys who mow the lawn: well, they’re in luck, because I’ll be damned if I push a mower up the hill. But otherwise, it’s time to cinch the belt..."

THINKING IT THROUGH II. Instapundit feels for Lileks and directs you to his Tip Jar. I mean, the suburban columnist's wife has just lost her job, folks! She's a well-connected lawyer, so who knows when she'll work again?

If your heart bleeds for them, prepare to bust out crying like a little girl for America's super-rich. Information from the IRS, reported by the New York Times, tells us that "the 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000." The Four Hundred have more than doubled their cut of the American pie since 1992. But at the same time, "their taxes grew at a much slower rate, from 1 percent of all taxes in 1992 to 1.6 percent in 2000." They also paid a lower rate on their taxes in 2000 than in 1992.

Now, this is where some ombudsman, real or self-appointed, says, "Class-warfare! Tone it down with some Republican talking points!" And so the Times' report contains this demurrer:

Those same numbers can be read to show that the wealthiest, as a group, bore a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden -- 1.6 percent of all taxes, vs. 1.1 percent of all income...

Break out the facial blotters. Once again, the rich are soaked! Too bad the Times didn't run a Tip Jar for the Four Hundred with the story. Then again, I imagine we've all been hitting their Tip Jar for quite some time.

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.