LESS THAN AUGUST. Columnists are often at their most revealing in silly-season thumbsuckers. Here's a passage from Dave Shiflett, "a member of the White House Writers Group," on Americans at the beach or some damned thing:

It is true that some fellow citizens have taken the Super Size craze a bit too seriously, growing to the size of fully adult manatees, to the point of having difficulty staying above ground in areas where the sand is not thoroughly packed. The larger point, however is that chunking up must now be considered an act of civil disobedience. In the current context, eating that extra éclair is a heroic act.

I'm cheating a bit, but not much, by not showing first Shiflett's run-up to this bizarre statement. He starts by castigating the anti-smoking law of the despised Bloomberg before hailing gluttony as a blow against the empire. See, first they banned smoking in bars -- clearly their next step is to padlock the freezer case at the Stop 'n' Shop.

The thing is, I sometimes have thoughts like Shiflett's, too: I hate Bloomberg's smoking ban (hell, I hate Bloomberg, with his depraved little "It's fun to play Mayor!" grin), and I can sympathize with anyone's annoyance at our therapeutic society. No one likes being told what to do, and some of us really don't like. (That's the secret of my success, certainly.) But within seconds of having them, I usually have this corollary thought: Congratulations, you're the one millionth writer to whine about "health nazis" and how they ruin everyone's good time. Here's your rattle.

Someone ought to render that service to Shiflett. It is genuinely weird to see a grown man (assuming Shiflett is grown) going out for a stroll on the boardwalk and observing of every expression of human pleasure he comes across that it is a "targetted activity" that some flying squad of blue-noses wants to ban. Well, yes, I suppose it is, but so what? When they come for the beer wagon, let me know.

You'd think the activities that are not targetted would please Shiflett, but no:

If we are going to go after rib eating, tobacco smoking, and beer drinking because they are drains on the health-care system, why not also clamp down on other behaviors that make people ill and cost lots of money, such as certain sexual practices?

Haw haw! That's tellin' them airy fairies what wants to take away our eclairs!

Here's why I can't be a conservative: I do not believe that the Surgeon General is the modern equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor. I would rather have sex than eat eclairs. And when a conservative columnist writes something that's supposed to be fun, like a beach blurb in August, I usually find it painful to read.

ATTENTION WHORES. "Web Hookups Blamed for Rise in AIDS" reads a headline out of the National HIV Prevention Conference and based on the new CDC numbers. You know, I do believe that a lot of the stuff people in this medium are saying about weblogs -- the kind of triumphalism I'm always dismissing -- is really based on the immense flood of traffic drawn by people's need to connect on more primal levels.

Even here I am happy to be linked, as 'twere, to like-minded blatherers -- I'm always pleased to be cited, answered, blogrolled. I believe the internet is really driven by a hunger for connection, and if you just look at the political weblog piece of it, you're missing the bigger picture. Behind most of the allegedly political, ideological, and journalistic impulses given for the weblog phenomenon are several millions of lonelinesses looking for surcease, a sign that someone feels as we feel. I strongly feel it when I scrawl (or post to) the comments sections of allegedly political weblogs -- that canker of isolation begging the balm of electronic contact.

This doesn't negate the good sense spoken by some of us, or even the nonsense spoken by others. But I think it should provide context for the exorbitant claims sometimes made for this little patch of public discourse. The desire to be heard (or to share on a grosser, in the Elizabethan sense, level) drives so strong that we should take it with a grain of salt, or sense.

It ill becomes me to say so, but if you haven't figured it out already (and you probably have), I'm a bit of an attention whore. I would suggest that most of the opinion vendors hereabouts tend that way, too.

"We are arrant knaves, all of us; believe none of us; to a nunnery, go!" Hamlet had that much right.

ORLANDO FURIOSO. Lord. Had to work this Convention in Orlando, and my preliminary response is, Orlando blows.

Well, that's grossly unfair, of course. I mainly saw the Convention Center and a Kinko's about 15 miles from it (and the infinite stretches of swamp grass, highway, and tourist trappings in between), and some other hotel bar where the art director and myself repaired for thrills (finding none) during our few free hours. As I am at present dead beat, I will just bullet-point you a bit of what I observed:

• Cabbies in Orlando could teach their NYC brethren something about thieving. Most routes were circuitous, most quotes outrageous. One driver offered to confirm his quote while driving to the destination! (We quickly pulled him over.) I can see this shit in New York or any other great, traditionally larcenous metropolis, but Orlando? Home of Mickey and Shamu? Small wonder the late Presidential election was so easily ganked here.
  
  
• In the Convention Center sodas cost $2.50. And the soda machines have credit card readers. I bought Mountain Dews with a credit card. I felt like Naomi Klein.
  
  
• But having experienced the vastness of the Orange County Convention Center, I begrudge Americans less their reliance on cars. The place comprises the equivalent of several football fields (10? 20? I cannot say), and having traversed these many times in the course of my various duties, and awakened after my few hours of allowed sleep with charley-horses, I began to hunger for the motorized carts availed by the more fat-assed among the attendees. America is big! Who knew?
  
  
• Everyone was very friendly, which I had expected, as I do make infrequent trips to America from the den of vice and intelligence I call home. But it was comforting to be reminded that the Bush-loving rabble are at bottom decent, well-meaning, sociable souls. It gave me hope that they may be right where they seem wrong, or if indeed wrong, then correctable.

More later, but I must reacclimate. God how I missed my City! My flight back took me over Manhattan. Ground Zero, which I had never observed from that height, looked like the space where one puts the battery panel on a laptop: flat, slightly irregular, asking to be filled.

TEE HEE. Gotta love this, via Google News:



Waiting for the usual suspects to blame the picture placement on the liberal media.

WHERE'S ROY? Sorry for the long absence. Weblog etiquette seems to require that we put up Out of Office messages when we're away. Most of the top bloggers do that, anyway, before they fuck off to some paradisical retreat paid for by the blood of the workers. I have always been a silently-slip-away sort, and I regret any resulting confusion or concern (fat chance).

I'm in Orlando on a job for my unnamed employers. I've spent most of the past three days running around the Orange County Convention Center. I can't stay long on the Mac right now (have to go get some tech support on a shitty Dell laptop) but I will get back to you soon about the fascinating, ugly place.

PRINCIPAL SKINNER AND MRS. CRABAPPLE MADE A BABY AND I SAW THE BABY AND THE BABY LOOKED AT ME. Moonie Times (aided and abetted by Sullivan) gives us the alleged Uday Hussein quote, "This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end." Interesting quote, especially from a dead man, especially from a dead man whose only real point of comparison in terms of unserious attacks on himself would be Bush Sr., not Clinton. You think maybe someone's gilding a lily here?

As for this "oily guns and steely knives" thing that SK Bubba mistrusts and Instapundit enjoys, I think that worth the benefit of the doubt. People can be astonishingly clever in all sorts of situations.

In general, though, my mother told me that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is, and I tend to discount blind (or dead) quotes that mysteriously support the prejudices of the media outlets that publish them.

In that spirit, I also find it suspicious that Reynolds goes "Yep" so much. Given his attitudes and prose style, I would be very surprised to learn that he was raised on the Pecos by Gabby Hayes, or in New England among a nest of Green Mountain Boys, which are the only conditions that naturally produce this linguistic peculiarity. I don't even think Ellen DeGeneres should be doing it, and I certainly wouldn't give a pass to the Ole Perfesser.

MOORE IS MORE. Michael Moore is one of the top hate-objects among wingers. So it is refreshing to see, in the midst of Kay S. Hymowitz's lengthy OpinionJournal attack on Moore, some passages in which the author addresses the question begged by most other, similar attacks: if Moore is such an evil spawn of Satan, how come he's so popular -- and not just with "trendy sophisticates in Cannes and Hollywood," as Hymowitz predictably notes, but millions of normal Americans in states Red as well as Blue?

Hymowitz allows how Moore is funny and folksy (or at least faux-folksy). And she also acknowledges -- and it's the only place I've seen this mentioned in the long, long canon of Moore antihagiography -- that Moore speaks to a nostalgia for that "populist's lost golden age" of the working class, before the age of endless layoffs; the days of the one-wage earner, two-car family, "where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure." She writes and quotes:

[Moore] evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. "My dad didn't live with this kind of fear," he has said of contemporary job instability. "The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well."

This sounds reasonable. It's also one of the few stretches of Hymowitz's piece that is free of sarcastic dismissals of any implication that such a socially balanced work environment as Moore celebrates might be superior to the dog-eat-dog, Hobbesean nightmare into which America deeper descends every year.

Indeed, she implies that only a social misfit would want to live in the old, more-fully-employed America: "Though not without its appeal," she admits, "Mr. Moore's vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club." The cool kids embrace change! Hymowitz points out that people get bored with repetitive jobs -- "the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line" -- as if those who, in the Reagan era, were thrown off those lines and into chronic unemployment should have been grateful for the change of scenery.

As Hymowitz breaks it down, the death of manufacturing was not only unavoidable, but also class-neutral and even ultimately beneficent:

As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market... companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn't just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust....the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions.

Well, speaking of nostalgia, the picture etched herein of American industry at the mercy of the Honda/Toyota menace does bring back the Lee Iacocca era, in which we were told that business "transformation" would save the American dream. Today, many of our former foreign competitors have conglomerated with American companies, but workers are still shit out of luck.

It seems to me this is the one hard nub Hymowitz and her crew can't break down. Yes, Moore is indulgent, and a prevaricator, and sometimes a hypocrite. But he knows that what he wants, and what a lot of us want, is attainable -- because it had been attained, in this country, only to be pissed away by a lot of greedy bosses, complaisant unions, and cynical politicians.

It's not nostalgia if you really think you can do it again. That's why Moore is, for all his kvetching, a positivist, and people love positivists -- ask Dale Carnegie! Which leaves his critics with the unenviable job of explaining to America why his happy vision should be resisted.

OOPS. Did an intemperate, incoherent post late last night, and have removed it. (What's your excuse for the leaving the rest of them up?--ed. Where were you when I needed you?--re) It was about Andrew Sullivan's response to Sam Tanenhaus on Ann Coulter and what ST seems to consider her erstwhile enablers (now critics) in the conservative movement. Sullivan thinks Tanenhaus unfairly "paint[s] diverse and serious writers like Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Horowitz as indistinguishable from Coulter." Well, Horowitz did write things like "Traitor in Chief," which more or less accused Clinton of selling us out to the Red Chinese. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump (maybe just a hop, actually) from that sort of thing to Coulterland. So it's piquant to see him, and a few others, now drawing a cordon sanitaire around her work.

But on sober reflection, it may be a good thing that they've distanced themselves from Coulter, even if only for ass-covering purposes. The high pitch of internet discourse hasn't been the best friend of reason -- I'm living proof of that -- and a dial-down here and there can't hurt.

[SIC]. A recent post from Andrew Sullivan:

DARK DAY FOR KRUGMAN: His hopes for recession seem to be receding.

If you don't know what's bughouse about this, explaining it to you would be a waste of my time.

CRAZIER THAN YOU THOUGHT. Leah at Eschaton has the proper attitude toward U.S. Institute of Peace board nominee Daniel Pipes. But I'm afraid she doesn't know the half of it (though the half she does know is pretty damning). In addition to his kill-'em-all-let-Michael-Ledeen-sort-'em-out approach to Middle Eastern affairs, Pipes has some interesting ideas about academic freedom here in the U.S. As I wrote back in November:

Columnist Daniel Pipes is unfailingly hard on Arabs, but he's murder on American professors of the antiwar persuasion. In this New York Post throwdown, he says our typical university is "a topsy-turvy world in which professors consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem and oil (not nukes) the issue." He also says the cloth-eared crowd "despise their own country," and describes them as "inept," "cranky and mistaken," and "the major American institution most alienated from the rest of the country."

After he's got that off his chest, Pipes gets down to prescriptions: "The time has come," he says, "for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities."

One might wonder when unthinking compliance with Administration policy became an educational responsibility, but Pipes has no time to explain--he's got a plan: "This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse."

(Well, if I don't quote myself, who will? By the way, I'm the new new Orwell. Pass it on.)

Pipes' plan to send flying squads of thought police to college seems to me reason enough to keep him away from power, and perhaps sharp objects, for the duration.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: "I'm not nuts! You're nuts!"

(Best imagined as Albert Brooks screaming into the speakerphone in Real Life.)

FACES OF DEATH. I can't quite fathom why the deaths of Torturedee and Torturedum were supposed to be a boon to Wall Street. They must be hungry for good news. ("Uday's dead! This'll drive pork bellies through the roof!")

Not to rain on the bonfire, but what threat did those two pose anymore? Their father's regime is good and dead, and given what has been said about the lads, one can hardly imagine them mounting a fiercely loyal Saddamite resistance ("Follow me, boys, and tonight I will feast on the flesh of your tortured bride!").

Well, any port in a storm, I suppose. Iraq is a bloody shirt that anyone can wave; if you're of one mind, you can flog the risk to military lives, the feckless management, and the senseless waste and overreach of the whole affair, and if you're of another, you can flaunt "Democracy! Whiskey! Sec'y of Defense!" and such like. The posted pix of the brothers' shattered melons give the latter faction a chance to whoop. It'll be someone else's turn soon enough.

Meanwhile dollars and lives continue to sink into Iraqi sand. Someday they'll kill Saddam Senior, and the footage will be available on streaming video, but that won't turn the sand to concrete.

IT'S A FAIR COP, BUT SOCIETY'S TO BLAME. Ted Barlow says I'm "often unfair but always hilarious." He's too kind on both counts. Good luck at the new job, Ted, and I hope you don't really have to stop posting altogether.

HOPE FOR OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. "One of the most popular campaigns to curb alcohol use on campus hasn’t reduced student drinking and may actually have increased it, according to a new report from the Harvard School of Public Health’s College Alcohol Study." -- MSNBC.

I had previously worried that the kids were devolving into something docile and feeble. I'm still not sure they aren't -- their music sucks, and their taste in novelty liquor products suggests rampant pussification. But if an anti-alcohol propaganda campaign makes them want to get even more drunk, maybe their heads are screwed on straighter than I thought.

HAYSEED UNHEARD FROM. I see by Newsday that Celia Cruz's "funeral procession was led by white horses pulling a hearse, followed by limousines and a statue of the patron saint of Cuba, Our Lady of Charity."

When may we expect that asshole Rod Dreher to write a snotty column about it?

BOOBS. With the country safely in the hands of war profiteers and Jesus freaks, movement conservatives now have leisure to attend to cultural matters. At OpinionJournal, Collin Levey makes a conservative case for breast implants. "A boob job is certainly safer than eating arsenic or removing ribs, things earlier generations of women did for beauty," says Ms. Levey. Besides, breast implants piss off feminists. Boo yah!

I guess my preference for real tits is part of what makes me a liberal. I'll leave the silicon sacks to the Heritage Foundation boys.

IT HAPPENED JUST THAT WAY. At NRO's The Corner, they're telling stories about how cool people love them and lame people hate them. Brookhiser gets props from a biker. Jack Fowler (who he?) goes him one better, or worse:

As the train pulled into Grand Central Station, we got up and walked to the door, next to which was an aging hippie and Cruella Deville look-alike who gasped upon seeing my “NATIONAL REVIEW” shirt and hat. She conniptioned: “How could anyone have the nerve except Buckley to wear that,” etc. “Gee mam,” I respond, hoping to give her a greater reason to hate me, “I not only wear the clothes, I work there too.” “You’re intolerant” she hisses intolerantly. I smiled, tipped my cap, and said: “Have a wonderful weekend."

Kinda like a "Mallard Fillmore" strip come to life, ain't it? I have a story of my own, every bit as believable:

I was walking down Fifth Avenue, proudly wearing my DOPE, GUNS, AND FUCKING IN THE STREETS T-shirt, when a miserable, pinch-faced, squinty-eyed, fat, sweating, ugly, bad-smelling preacher, carrying a bible and drooling tobacco juice, let out a squeal and charged me, dragging by the hand former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick, looking every bit of her 107 years of age. "You is doin' th' Devil's work!" squealed the preacher, "Y'all ought to get right with God, head out to the Red States, lynch niggers, stomp faggots, an' drive a S.U.V.!" Jeanne Kirkpatrick nodded her three-foot-long head in agreement. "I, too, hate people of color and homosexuals," she rasped, "and my car is rather large." I sprayed them both with my squirting flower and they melted into dust.

I SHOUTED OUT, WHO KILLED DAVE KELLEY?/WHEN AFTER ALL, IT WAS THE BBC! Shit floats. The nutty idea raised by Andrew Sullivan yesterday has risen to the status of a new Right-wing meme: the BBC killed David Kelley by exposing the reluctant whistleblower to the wrath of the Blair Government. Here, the New York Post parrots:

BBC officials refused to disclose their source, but said the story was based on "one senior and credible source in the intelligence services."

An understandably outraged Blair ordered an investigation, which quickly focused on Kelly, a microbiologist involved in the search for WMD.

Ordered to testify before a House of Commons panel, he insisted he couldn't have been the source - because he hadn't said anything remotely like what Gilligan reported.

"From [our] conversation, I don't see how he could make the authoritative statement he was making," said Kelly.

But when Kelly - obviously distraught over having been thrust into the limelight - took his own life last week, the BBC confessed that he had, in fact, been the network's source.

Problem is, Kelly was never in the intelligence services. Nor was he "one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier."

And, as he himself insisted just days before his death, he'd never said what the BBC claimed he said.

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of having "sexed up" the information it gave the public, it's the BBC - not Tony Blair.

Two things jump out. First, there is some debate as to how the reporter actually characterized Kelley's role. This will probably be clarified soon enough in England, but by then the perpetrators of the current anti-BBC story, having milked it for all its stateside value, will have moved on to some other outrage, obviating any need for retraction that may arise among those few Americans who give a shit about British politics.

Secondly, this interpretation asks us to believe that when and if the Beeb misrepresented Kelley, he thereafter had no chance of a fair hearing by the Blairites, hence the suicidal despair. Given that Kelley, in this imagining, would be extremely useful to the Blair government in denying the BBC story, why would they not then clamp him lovingly to their breast? Isn't it more likely that Kelley, finding himself a major figure in what is turning out to be the biggest British Government scandal since Profumo, got cold feet?

The truth of this case may be unknowable, but we may know that certain explanations are not only unlikely, but perfidious.

CLOGS, FROGS, SPROUTS, ETC. Victor Davis Hanson on nationalized name-calling:

Remember various Germans' eerie evocations of Bush/Hitler, "another Caesar," Jews in Miami and New York, clicking one's heels, the German way, and other foul nonsense. Certain French apparatchiks and their consorts weighed in with slurs against Turkey and Eastern Europe ("end of Europe," "foreign culture," the need to stay "in their places," etc.) or Israel ("sh**ty little country"). Canada's officials chimed in with "moron," and other assorted outbursts. In contrast, very few in the Bush administration engaged in such childish smears.

Well, of course they don't -- Bushites have people to do that for them. Like Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Forget the fact that the German contribution to the Renaissance was the realization that you could fit more beer in a bigger mug... a German Green is a Gestapo wannabe with a red paint-job... little German babies...

Peters ends this diatribe with a prose poem about how ugly and ill-mannered he found these two Germans he saw once.

I think we can agree that this sort of thing, while enjoyable in small doses, is unseemly in high places (and at the Post). And it says something awful about the current crop of democracies, including ours, that some people think they can drum up public support with that kind of behavior.

DAVID KELLEY STILL DEAD. ANDREW SULLIVAN STILL NUTS. A source for the BBC's WMD allegations, scientist David Kelley, talks of "dark actors playing games," then turns up dead. Official report is suicide.

If you are not inclined to take official reports seriously, you might suspect that the Blair Government had something to do with Kelley's death. They had something to gain by his silencing, certainly.

That might be paranoid. But if that's paranoid, what clinical psychiatric term would describe blaming Kelley's death on the BBC? Why, Andrew Sullivan, of course:

It is certainly not to the credit of the Blair government that, when Kelly told his superiors of his contact with the BBC, they pushed Kelly into the limelight in their defense. But they are still not ultimately responsible for this tragedy. Kelly deserved to have his views accurately represented by the BBC, rather than hyped in a way that made him the center of a grueling public storm. That very hype destroyed his privacy and led this very private man to despair. Someone at the BBC must be held accountable. And resign.

This paragraph -- from its vague acknowledgement of the real issue in this case, to the even more vague implication that Kelley's revelations were "hyped" and therefore not "accurately represented," to the final absurd misdirection of blame -- is a masterpiece of dementia.

Of course, it's possible Sullivan's not crazy -- merely eagerly deflecting attention away from his beloved Tony Blair, and trying to make a twofer of it by implicating one of his many voodoo dolls.

Geez, it says something about the guy that even the most charitable explanations for his behavior make him look bad.