KNOW WHEN TO HOLD, KNOW WHEN TO FOLD 'EM. Tommy Franks -- gooood career move. Leave as liberator, and let some other poor schmuck do the mopping up. "Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered Franks the post of Army chief of staff -- the highest job in the Army. But Franks turned it down," reports ABC. Well, of course. It's not going to be like '91, when Colin Powell won hearts and minds with the first Iraq dust-up -- this one's going to smolder and smell, and Franks is well out of it. 57's a nice age, and the man has plenty of options. Got his MBA (W's degree!) summa cum laude (not W's standing!), yet keeps the common touch, as shown by this bit from SCLM outlet PBS:

Tommy Franks, the general who will command American troops should the U.S. go to war with Iraq, speaks with a west Texas vernacular very familiar to his commander in chief.

"Mr. President, I'm finer than the hair on a frog's back," the 57-year-old Texan once responded when Mr. Bush inquired about his welfare.

As we are now in an age of endless war, might our Presidential election cycles to come feature at least some military contenders? During and after the Civil War we had McClellan and Grant. Eisenhower had two terms, and MacArthur had some traction after Korea. Wesley Clark has already been mentioned for 2004, and we all know Powell's only biding his time. Franks is telegenic, bright, and now has secured perhaps the greatest treasure a Presidential contender could have: plausible deniability.

At present, Franks lacks a McClellan letter of the sort the late candidate wrote to his Commander-in-Chief (whom he called "your Excellency") in 1862. Which is all to the good: that letter was a problem for McClellan -- it telegraphed his political ambitions, both implicitly and explicitly ("In carrying out any system of policy which you may form, you will require a Commander in Chief of the Army;  one who possesses your confidence... I do not ask that place for myself...."), and staked out a distressingly soft position on slavery. We are an even more politically opaque people than once we were. We have no way to know what Franks feels about anything, and that in itself has to have potential political masterminds salivating.

Of course all this ignores the possibility that the United States will itself be placed one day under military command, but at present it's hard to see why they would bother.

NOT AS ADVERTISED. Never read Eve Tushnet before. Had been given the impression (forget by who -- one meets so many people at detoxification centers) that she was of the reasonable sort of winger. Was unprepared, therefore, for ravings, in which a light and breezy Kinsley column,"Abolish Marriage: Let's really get the government out of our bedrooms," is denounced for promoting "ad hoc" crypto-marriages that will create ('scuse, have created) "chaotic lives, fatherless children, shattered relationships, post-abortion grief, poverty, and fatalism."

Well, at least we don't have to wonder where the next generation of Maggie Gallaghers are coming from. What I do wonder is, how can such people live so long without developing a sense of humor?

TV EYE. Boy, I enjoyed that vacation. No, not mine -- Edroso the Wrath of God does not take vacations (neither can he afford them) -- I mean Instapundit's. Even in a web world crammed to bursting with irritants, the temporary absence of the Ole Perfesser was a palpable relief. I felt like an immunocompromised patient who had suddenly found himself with one less opportunistic infection.

Alas, the Perfesser has resurfaced, and is dishing out nonsense like it was going out of style (whereas, of course, the contrary is true). Here he is on the BBC:

How about ending the public subsidy and letting the private sector take over? The likelihood that a major, state-subsidized entity with considerable political clout can actually be objective and fair over the long term is so small that it would seem better to drop the pretense, and to quit subsidizing the political views of the New Class under a threadbare cloak of public service that no longer fools anyone but the gullible.

There is, of course, not one media outlet in Christendom, subsidized or not, that could reasonably be called "objective and fair" (or for that matter, "fair and balanced") -- though some might serve as small counterweights to the larger media interests that piledrive their agenda into the public consciousness.

In the Brits' case the larger media interests more or less consist of Rupert Murdoch, or as he is known to lapsed Catholics such as myself, the Father of Lies. Since Murdoch's Sun broke ranks with the Tories to back Blair for his first term ("It's the Sun Wot Won It!" cried the tabloid's post-electoral headline), the PM has been most helpful to the SkyNews King's multifarious interests. The end of the BBC's subsidy would of course be a great boon to Murdoch, eliminating a great deal of his commercial and ideological competition. (Just in case you thought this was a principled argument we were dealing with.)

I'm not surprised that Blair is leaning this way. Nor am I surprised that the Perfesser would shout encouragement from his kudzu-covered ivory tower. But I am a little surprised at Rocky Top's last crack: "...a threadbare cloak of public service that no longer fools anyone but the gullible."

Whom does he believe is being fooled? The BBC, like PBS over here, is a known quantity, availed by those who enjoy it and ignored by those who don't. There seems to be a real niche, albeit a small one, for both the British and American state-run networks. We can argue as to whether the state should run a network at all (or a bank, or a Federal Trade Commission, or an interstate highway system, etcetera ad nauseum).

But what's inarguable is that a lot of people enjoy the BBC and PBS. Even crabby rightwing Americans have to admit that, when they visit the U.K. and turn on the tube back at the hotel, the BBC stuff beats holy hell out of our own network crap. And quality-starved Yanks aren't the only ones who notice. Last year the Beeb beat its main commercial rival, ITV, in ratings for the first time since 1954.

Ditto for PBS. Even midwestern housewives watch Bill Moyers, not because Big Brother has commanded it, but because he's an appealing presenter with an interesting viewpoint -- one that, no one needs to be reminded, is increasingly hard to find on the SCLM stations anymore.

Let's face it. State-run TV networks are magnets for culturally astute people, who usually think very differently from the corporate scumbags, giant-foam-fingered booster-boobs, hack artists, and mentally microcellular organisms that keep the Nets going. This difference is used as an excuse for getting rid of them -- they represent the "New Class," boo hiss -- but it's actually a pretty good reason to keep them. In heatwaves, the cops let the kids tap the hydrants so they can play in the water -- can't we have similar relief in the airwaves?

"'THERE IS STILL WEAKNESS IN THE EMPLOYMENT SECTOR,' said Michelle Clayman, chief investment officer at New Amsterdam Partners, which manages US$1.8 billion in New York. 'We need to see more of the underlying economic numbers turning around for the market to have legs'... The US unemployment rate jumped to 6.4 percent, the highest since April 1994, from 6.1 percent in May."

"Bush's weapon of political destruction is money, lots of it. Within five days, Mrs. Bush and Cheney raised a combined $1.4 million in separate fund-raisers in Cincinnati and Fairlawn, an Akron suburb. It’s part of $34.2 million that the Bush-Cheney ’04 re-election campaign raised during the past three months, said Dan Ronayne, campaign spokesman. Of the total, $21.7 million came from 14 fund-raising events featuring the president, Cheney or Mrs. Bush. The campaign also raised money through direct mail and contributions made over the Internet."

Who got your money?

HAWKS & DOVES. I marked Independence Day by putting on Neil Young's "Hawks & Doves." This record comes from one of Young's peripatetic periods, in which he seemed to be doing whatever struck his weed-addled fancy at any given moment, but the gesture of respect toward the American idea is genuine and often touching. The title track is real nice, and here are some of the words:

In history, we painted pictures grim
The Devil knows we may feel that way again
The big wind blows, so the tall grass bends
But for you, don't push too hard, my friend

Got people here down on their knees and prayin'
Hawks and doves are circling in the rain
Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'
If you hate us, you just don't know what you're saying

It's mild out this 4th of July morning, but the sun is bright and climbing. Sunlight is the reason, by the way, that the writing on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both now scientifically maintained and heavily guarded at our National Archives, is so faint. For years they were shown under glass in a public place, outdoors, so that the light that fell on the land and the citizens also illuminated those words.

The ink proved less durable than the land and the citizens. What about the ideas? Well, across the web world now you may read that we are either deprived of liberty, or supersaturated with it, in ways that would shame the Founders. Some believe it is far too difficult to get a handgun in East New York, and some lament the growing decriminalization of recreational sex.

These people are of course nuts, but many of us, maybe even most of us, are at least a little nuts in the same ways. I heard a Klansman cry once, "We carved our place in this wilderness with a Bible and a gun!" I think he was right. We love our autonomy, and the idea that with the right machines (including the kind that kill) we can do, as the lovely and supremely American phrase puts it, whatever the fuck we want. And we also believe ourselves to be the keepers of the Word, which the American accent renders pretty harsh at times, and inspires us to string up varmints.

So I can see where the wingnuts of all descriptions are coming from. In a way (just in a way) it is a marvelous thing that we are all here, grabbing at the rudder of the Ship of State.

The Puritans who settled here surely never imagined our community would be so contentious (and free of stocks and dunking-stools); perhaps neither did the Patriots, who set out from their little homes to shake a tyrant off their backs, not to establish a Federal Trade Commission. Maybe the Founders saw a little more, but I doubt they saw us, though maybe Jefferson did when he said this:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Jefferson's God and mine may not exactly resemble one another (though I'm a Deist too), but I can see something in this. To his thinking liberty was natural, but also sufficiently foreign to the hearts of men that they might abuse it in their ignorance. And so he and his buddies made a Constitution that defends liberty, not any group or church or philosophy, or even the particular, now quaint, way of life these orderly men enjoyed. All that was left up to us.

Look what we've made of it. Is it good? Well, there's good and bad in it, certainly. I think those guys over the hill are ruining this country, and they think the same of me. Yet our battles haven't wrecked the joint. If the Civil War didn't wreck it, how the hell could we? Though the parchment crumbles and the ink is all but gone, the prescriptions the Founders wrote seem still to serve us well.

This is what we celebrate today. The date commemorates the Declaration and the fireworks commemorate the battles of the Revolutionary War, but this day is for America, the place, the people, and the idea. There will be mayhem and madness, some drunk will punch and maybe plug someone; when I turn on the TV some idiot will be talking. But if we are mindful of the occasion we will be somewhat easy that even this will not shake the pillars of the Republic. Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain.

BLAIR AMERICAN STYLE. Meanwhile back in the UK, Tony Blair is hunkering down as British press and politicians, infinitely more adversarial than our own ("Blair is No Better than a Kung-Fu Monkey," howls the Telegraph), accuse him of pre-invasion prevarication.

To Yankee eyes the spectacle is surprising. Much of the current talk, as outlined by the Guardian, is centered around a claim, allegedly included in a draft of the Government's Iraq dossier, that Saddam could set off nukes on 45 minutes' notice.

Here in the good old USA, of course, the President had us scared silly of a tinpot dictator who couldn't even defend his own country, and as it becomes increasingly clear that this threat was vastly exaggerated, we treat it as an academic exercise. We sustain a long-running shell game with Iraqi WMD evidence. (As reported by CNN, the latest claim is imminent proof of a "WMD program that could have turned out an operational weapon on short notice. " Not short enough to save Saddam, apparently. Maybe the fuses rolled behind a couch?) The general presumption is that some bullshit was employed, but so what?

That the Brits are more outraged at apparently smaller distortions does not necessarily mean that they lay greater stock in truth than we do. The American people backed Bush, and identifies still with his cause, but the British public has been less convinced; we have a lot more to lose or gain, psychologically, in probing the wounds that truth sustained in prosecuting the war, while for the British it's pretty much all on Blair.

Also, MPs have a centuries-old habit of standing up and roaring at the PM. This Blair must endure, and whenever I've watched Question Time on TV he seemed to handle himself well. But I can't imagine it's much fun for him now.

Back in 1996 much was made of Blair's similarity to Bill Clinton -- centrist, smooth, modern. It's beginning to look, though, as if it's really the model of the American Presidency, irrespective of occupant, that he emulates. This is canny because, as Britain grows more Americanized, what works for the Oval Officer is a good bet to work for the Prime Minister (and what fails here will fail there, too -- poor John Major filled the befuddled Bush Sr. role as well as Blair fit challenger Clinton's). It's a little tougher now for Blair, but I would bet on him to hang in -- especially as his Government's tactics, as shown in this South Africa report from June, are obviously cued by the American style of spin:

A spokesman for Blair's office said that the government's investigation into the two trailers in Iraq was still under way.

But he also said on customary condition of anonymity that no credible evidence had been found so far to suggest they were not used as part of Iraq's chemical and biological programs.

No evidence they were not used! Shades of Charles Foster Kane telling old Mr. Thatcher, outraged by his claim of a Spanish "armada" off the Jersey coast, "Can you prove it isn't?"

TO SLEEP, NO MORE. The Wall Street Journal reports (and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel partially reprints without requiring registration) that "Less than a century ago, Americans averaged about nine hours of sleep a night." Now, it's more like seven, and "a third of the population now trudges by on six hours or less."

Enlightened, aren't we? Our parents could maintain a house and a car on a single salary -- we can't. Once, the 40-hour work week was standard -- no more. And now we can't even sleep right.

WSJ also reports that, in addition to Ambien-style sleep aids, pharm companies are now working on a new class of drug to "help people perform better on less sleep." These concoctions carry the disturbingly scientific name "wake agents."

At least in Huxley's Brave New World they gave you soma. Now we get fake speed. Crap. Even our dystopias ain't what they used to be.

STORMIN' NORMAN. Norman Mailer has made amendations to his earlier piece on Bush and war for the New York Review of Books. Like all great writers, Mailer improves his work everywhere he touches it, but this bit about a recent piece of Presidential theatre is especially good:

He chose—this overnight clone of Honest Abe—to arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing. The carrier was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.

Speaking of nonstop foulings, I hate to even use this phrase, but in this case there's no getting around it: read the whole thing.

Found via Cursor.

STUPID PREZ TRICKS. Sez K-Lo at NRO: "I suspect, although the press and others looking for the White House to take sides now, that the administration will wind up coming out for the federal marriage amendment post-Massachusetts. They would have never greenlighted Frist to embrace it if that was not the likely plan..."

How clever, if ungrammatical! Here come de Prez on Majority Leader Frist's anti-gay-marriage amendment plan: "I don't know if it's necessary yet... Let's let the lawyers look at the full ramifications of the recent Supreme Court hearing. What I do support is a notion that marriage is between a man and a woman."

As Lopez suggests, the White House and Frist are obviously in accord, but still mask their animus by playing bad-cop, slightly-less-bad-cop on the issue. Why the pretense? Isn't Bush supposed to be unbeatable in 2004?

There are all kinds of ways to interpret this, and I don't want to be too optimistic, but it's just too -- piquant to see the Fearless Leader playing grab-ass (pardon the expression, social conservatives!) with this issue. His minions have been playing at invincibility for so long that it's a pleasure to watch them wheedle.

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.