HALF A ROLL IS BETTER THAN NONE. People ask why I don't have comments, or a blogroll. Well, for one thing, I figure if you want to tell me what you think, you'll take the trouble to write to me (just like in the good old days of wax seals, quills, and pistols at dawn!) or scathe me in your own blog. Let my little fame be spread widely if not thickly. Anyway, why should I support your squawks with my hard-earned web hosting fees? That's the sort of Bullshit Libertarian I am!

Also: I think even my most communitarian readers will admit that most on-premises commentary either starts as crap or devolves to it. Interestingly (and remember, you didn't hear this from me), some of the group gripes at Free Republic are more interesting than what you see in the usual vaccs or ratemymusic daughter windows. Within the winger community there are many cadres and schismatics, and their internecine slugfests can turn into donnybrooks a la Donovan's Reef, crashing through walls of logic and spilling into tide pools of paranoid conspiracy.

The only problem with those exhilirating spectacles is, those people are nuts -- starking, staring splitters of insanely fine and even insubstantial hairs. If you want to see sane people talking, you may find that at sites like CalPundit, where the topics are always meaty and draw an intellectually appetitive and often eloquent crowd. That's where the old dream of web community yet lives, and I salute its enablers.

But whom does Alicublog draw? I don't know. Never put in a Counter -- prefer to write as if no one is reading; question of epistolary discipline. I do know that what winds up on these pages is mostly dark mutterings, sometimes sardonic, on occasion comedic, and seldom general enough to facilitate roundtable discussion. I like to think I follow my subjects down rabbit-holes of extrapolative logic too narrow and winding for crowds to comfortably follow. Is that selfish? Should I not instead lay the floor open for a massive Maoist group criticism? ("Comrade Edroso is guilty of the crime of obscurantism! The Dixie Chicks are a topic great enough for all workers to share, yet Edroso would pound it into a nugget that would not last one hour in the furnace of the Collective Waste Processing Plant!") Sorry, comrade. Though I care what you think (do correspond! I shall read your letters in the light of the piazza!), I can't bring myself to lay the doors of my mansion wide open just yet.

(As to the second reason: I'm just hella lazy. Me and my 98-pound sidekick, Dial-Up Modem, muscle our way into Blogger, lay the incendiaries, and vamoose -- not leaving much time for redesign.)

That said, I will commend you to some spiffy weblogists who give me some fun and edification, and might do as well for you:

Roger Ailes. The Hunting and the Snark. Possessed of an attitude shittier (in the best sense) than mine, and more sharply on point.

Very Very Happy. Ailes pointed me here, to a superb post at a generally very keen site. And it's all good. Sample quote: "Holy hell, I can hear Luskin's erection. And I'm half a continent away from him."

Busy Busy Busy. Custodians of the "Shorter" format. My only complaint is that they should post more frequently. So many fools be blogging!

Fables of the Reconstruction. A reliable pisser. Nota bene: I give any poster of Victorian porn ten extra points.

Cursor. Not commentary (much) -- links. A pointer site, in the old pre-bust jargon. And chances are they'll be here, pointing powerlessness to truth, after the bust has gone nationwide (ETA: a coupla months).

Eschaton. Because he's/she's there.

Jesus' General. Super spotty posting -- but if you've never gone, go. He is especially eloquent on how Clinton damaged his "little soldier."

Orcinus. Prisoners incarcerated with G. Gordon "Will" Liddy used to say, "Better not mess with Liddy -- he knows something!" Orcinus knows quite a bit. Former Black Ops, or just an especially keen observer? I bow to his compound sentence structure.

Like Father Like Sun. He has spent his days capering with fools at the New York Sun when he should have been shaking all East Anglia with the thunder of his genius. But 'sokay. Plenty more where that came from.

Sasha Castel. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong BUT: sometimes capable of very sound advice.

A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT? (CORRECT ANSWER: WHAT?) "Already, actors Tom Hanks, Cybill Shepherd and Martin Sheen have spoken out against Arnie [Schwarzenegger]'s campaign," reports WOKR-TV in Rochester. But now it's serious, the station reports: Arnold has been dissed by The Dixie Chicks.

"He is a great film star," admitted DC Emily Robinson. "But I find his idea to run for governor absolutely insane. America should be governed by people who have a clue."

How weird this country has become. Political protests against a film that hasn't even opened. An actor running for California Governor on a platform so free of substance (and crammed with happythink pronouncements like "I want to become an expert in all education") that it tramples the already low bar for candidate accountability into the dirt. And now performers from nowhere near the state that candidate intends to govern making headlines by weighing in.

We're fighting in Iraq to ensure the "triumph of democracy," the President says. Well, maybe the Iraqis will make a better job of it than we have.

NINE-ELEVENMANIA! This comes, predictably, from the New York Post, but, less predictably (indeed, almost refreshingly for students of advanced inanity), in a restaurant review:

Church & Dey, with a knockout third-floor view over Ground Zero, would be a disgrace anywhere. But at a site indelibly scored by horror and heroism, it borders on scandal...

Church & Dey's disregard for even minimal standards demeans all who have given their best at the World Trade Center site -- from the 9/11 rescuers to those striving to create something new and inspiring there...

It is a blemish on the Millenium Hilton, whose owners and staff are due all credit for the hotel's rebirth. It's an insult to the restaurant's own hard-working employees, some of whom worked there on 9/11 and whose return was fraught with anguished memories...

See, it's not just pinko Democrats who soil the memory of 9/11. It's also those who poorly prepare wild mushroom compote mere yards away from the site of an upcoming Republican photo opportunity!

I'm gonna spend tomorrow night at the fucking movies.

TREMORS. I guess 9/11 is getting close, because the gibberish vendors are hauling out the industrial-grade traitor bait.

Tacitus, for example, tells us how "domestic opposition can lend moral support to America's enemies," in that charming, I'm-just-sayin' manner that has made him a beloved figure in American letters. By the way, spot the motif in this passage:

Remember the pro-French Jeffersonians and their, er, staunch patriotism as whipped up by Citizen Genet back in the 1790s? Remember the Confederate hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1864 election? Remember Aguinaldo's hopes for a Democratic victory in the 1900 election? Remember the Vietnamese communists' expressed appreciation for the antiwar movement in the 1960s? Remember the Soviet endorsement of Western movements for nuclear freeze and disarmament? Remember Saddam Hussein's statement of support for the 18 January ANSWER protests this year?

Democrats! Democrats all -- including the filthy Francophile Jefferson! (No mention, interestingly, of the America Firsters.)

One hardly needs to read Brendan Miniter's OpinionJournal peroration any further than its grand title, "Where Were You? And where do you stand two years after Sept. 11?" Sounds like a HUAC Chairman grilling a witness. The body copy is more poetic (well... are there any such words as "poetastic" or "poetasterrific?"). "Someday someone will ask you that perennial question of historical events," Miniter sententiously starts, and one's ears perk -- what might that perennial question be? Hope it's the Riddle of the Sphinx -- I know that one!

But it turns out this "someone," who sounds suspiciously like Raymond Massey in "Things to Come," has more than one question to ask from his lonely promontory in the Asgardian wastes of the future: "Were you willing to control your fear and make the sacrifices necessary to defeat the terrorists and their murderous ideology?" Moreover, "Were you willing to leave the United Nations in its moral confusion and confront the enemy in his sanctuaries?" Yes to a, no to b? Depart from me, ye wicked, into everlasting darkness!

Here, too, Democrats are pictured as out of step with regular Americans: "Howard Dean says the Iraq war was based on a lie and that there are now more terrorists there than when Saddam ruled. Wesley Clark claims America is failing in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Other Democrats running for president have launched similar attacks. These are the words of those who would offer us the middle ground between good and evil." [emphasis mine] In this bad-editorial-cartoon world Miniter has created, we may picture this middle ground as an alley, behind the church and abutting a speakeasy, where truant Dems loiter, deaf to the entreaties of the Preacher, and thus drift into ruinous contact with libertine dictators and scarlet anchorwomen.

Fear not, there are prescriptions: "...we must also move toward rebuilding the civil institutions that ensure the strength of our republic. In the schools we must rescue civics from the social-studies teachers who teach anti-Americanism." (That again?) "In the public square we must fight to preserve the right of religious expression. Within our churches we must demand that our religious leaders lead..."

Demand that our religious leaders lead! One envisions Miniter hauling Father Flotsky up the nave for pulpit-pounding lessons. "Shake your fist thus, priest," instructs the columnist, "for he leads best that maketh a baleful noise unto the Lord."

It'll just get worse, I'm sure. But I do note that the hooey-meter has gone up and down in off-season, so perhaps it were best to batten down the hatches till the patriots (is there such a word as "patriotaster"?) have blown their respective wads.

UPDATE 9/10: Tactitus says, "Roy Edroso is annoyed that all the examples I give of domestic opposition lending support to the enemy are of Democrats. Well. So they are." Yes, the record is clear: Democrats have been aiding and abetting the enemy since the 18th Century. How is it that the heads of Jefferson, Jackson, FDR et alia didn't end up on spikes overlooking the Potomac? Must be an eternal-evil, LOTR thing.

While I appreciate and indeed often share T's Hatfield/McCoy approach to American politics, this is probably a good time to say out loud that just because a foreign power, even a belligerent, sees some gain for themselves in an American policy development does not mean that such a development constitutes "support to the enemy" in any but the most uselessly pedantic sense. This country currently engages in trade with China -- evil, evil China! -- and is probably the only force preventing the Palestinians from obliteration. Is Bush then guilty of giving aid and comfort to Wen Jiabao and Yasser Arafat? (Well, some people probably think so, but...)

Disregard this if T is joking. And he well be, for all I know. I am notoriously bereft of a sense of humor.

GODWIN'S LAW BE DAMNED. CalPundit links to Quaker in a Basement (o roll dem blogs!) on Republican legislators' plans to enforce "intellectual diversity" in Colorado schools via gummint action. These plans were allegedly inspired by David "Tell the Black People to Stop Staring at Me" Horowitz.

As I noted back in ought-two (scroll down to November 14), Daniel Pipes has floated a similar plan, by which "outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others)" would "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." This, Pipes reasoned, is made necessary by a preponderance of "American Academics Who Hate America" -- and the need is made more pressing because "we are at war."

CalPundit and the Quaker are good on the legal problems with this approach (not to mention its rank hypocracy), but a strong word should be raised about the moral issue of sending flying squads of "outsiders" to monitor and correct ideological balance in colleges and universities. I know we've been cautioned by various Basil Fawltys not to mention the War but this really is perilously close to Nazi shit:

The first indications of an emerging cultural policy in Germany were barely noticed by the general public. On April 13, 1933 the German Student Association posted a twelve point "Proclamation" at the entrance doors of the Univerity of Berlin, demanding from the universities a greater sense of responsibility toward the German race, the German language, and German literature...

And:

The Nazification of Germany in the 1930s did not happen overnight. A key part of this Nazification process was the campaign called "Gleichschaltung" -- which means "getting everyone in step." The Nazis announced that a proud, new, patriotic Germany was being born out of pain and danger... For a decade from the late '20s to the late '30s, communists, radicals, progressives and Jews were targeted in the universities and other institutions -- and so were many who defended them. The emergence of a "new normalcy" in the late '30s was a prelude to wider war and greater horrors.

Bringing up the bad boys of Berlin is a blogger no-no, a blowing of one's cool in a hypercool medium. And of course the Nazis weren't asking for diversity, while Pipes and Horowitz seek only a limited outside intervention in the affairs of academia. And it's not the Student Affairs Bureau that would administer the plan between concert bookings and theme nights in the cafeteria. Besides, there's speech codes, and that was the other side. And Horowitz is Jewish, etc.

But fuck it. I say it's fascist and I say the hell with it.

FAT CATS. "U.S. Report: 1 in 4 Pets Obese." -- CNN. At first I thought it said, "1 in 4 Pets Obsess," and I thought, so now it's come to this.

Actually I still feel that way. This is the sort of headline that drives some of us crazy. Oh boy, we think, next they're be providing obstetric service to snakes, and they we realize, they already do.

Well, to echo the warden in A Clockwork Orange, these new, ridiculous ideas have come at last. But this rope is a little easier to let go of than some. No doubt in the near future most people will consider paunchy pooches a newsworthy outrage nearly equal to those is-your-child-safe scare stories on the local news. Lead paint chips today, tabby treadmills tomorrow! And maybe it's a good thing. Not many years ago, as was pointed on in the aforereferenced New Yorker story (which is quite good, but I can't find it online -- it's by Burkhard Bilger in last week's issue, find it if you can), animals were left to sicken and starve, and gradually we came to feel sufficiently for our animal friends to provide them medicine and shelters. Animal wellness is already a common theme on boxes of Purina Cat Chow, and now it's a big media story. Maybe this is the next step in our evolution.

We are told that it is right and noble to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!" but the future is rushing in from all directions and we have to pick our shots. It is a strange thought for an old liberal, but this story may be a sign that the new breed (of people, I mean) is becoming more humane, so to speak, than ever we thought to be, and as long as no multibillion dollar government plan is in the offing (cut to some future President holding up a dog tag and announcing veterinary coverage that is yours at whelping and can never be taken away, while a translator goes "Woof, woof, woof, woof"), I guess I can let this one slide.

REMEMBRANCE DAY. Lileks today:

This reminds me of a gentle tut-tutting I got from some guy on a webpage I stumbled across post 9/11 -- he was just so... bemused at how I’d lost my grasp on reality. I had been describing my reaction to the men who’d kill my daughter for the glory of Allah: give me the gun, show me the cave. The author of the piece suggested I would be perfect for the role of the WW2 black-out warden who scolds people for half-closed windowshades.

Why, it’s almost as if I thought we were at war, or something.

Oooh, I gushed, jumping up and down in my poodle skirt and cradling my "Gallery of Regrettable Food" to my chest, he noticed!

My official position is that everyone's entitled to a personal, even a personalized, reaction. My own personal reaction in those days was that we had gone through something terrible and hysteria was not helping. It still sort of reminds me of when Harry Carey Jr., crazed with grief at the savage murder of his girl, went running at the Comanche in The Searchers and got himself killed. I don't think the Duke loved the girl any less because he didn't follow suit.

Well, that was then, and this is... then, I guess. We're ramping up to the Memorial and encouraged to get mad. At whom? The Talented Mr. Bin Laden? I have no love for the surviving "Islamic fascists," and if I worked myself into a grand mal seizure over them I imagine it might momentarily banish my disappointment that we have conducted our struggle against them haphazardly, leaving thousands dead, a fat albatross of a ruined nation in our hands, and murderous would-be viziers stoking oil-fires of resentment against us. But that would bring no victims back to life, no honor to their memory, and no solution any nearer.

I think the worst thing we could do to the folks Lileks wants to murdalize is put their ignorant, feudal, vengeful, priest-ridden, savage way of life into the past tense, forever. I have a hunch that in the long run it will take more convincing than killing. Call that bleeding-heart traitorousness if you like. I prefer to call it what we did back when we used that strategy against the Soviet Union: victory.

If you think shaking fists at the cave-dwellers will speed that event, God go with you. If you prefer to shake your fist at me for showing insufficient respect for your shaking fist, have fun. Ignorance is my only real enemy, and I know it is too weak to prevail.

THE RACE IS ON. Last night's Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate draws the expected results: dismissive, "who cares?" snot-blowing from right-wingers, who still think disdain is a strategy, and from conservatarians, who are perplexed that no challenger has come out strongly against public roads, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other such extraconstitutional abominations.

Myself, I thought it was refreshing to see seven people who didn't like President Bush on TV together. (Has there been some sort of federal law against that since 9/11?) And, as a proud partisan, I enjoyed even the lame cracks on W, including Gephardt's "miserable failure" mantra.

Some random notes:

None of the candidates seemed barking mad. Well, Kucinich was... astringent I think is the best word, his gaunt face pained as he roared truth to powerlessness. But though his jihad against NAFTA is strong medicine, it's no more so than Pat Buchanan's, and we all respect him, right? Everyone else was pretty avuncular, including Moseley-Braun, which was suprising, since the righties are always unleashing the vilest invective against her (black, female, and not a complete tool? Into the briar patch with you!).

Bob Graham is running for Vice-President. He's too old and dull for the top job, but his offering is clear: put me on the ticket, and I'll have my goons stop Jeb's goons from stealing a second election. It ain't a bad case. I just hope he doesn't get bored pretending to run for President.

Joe Lieberman really is the candidate from, to paraphrase Doctor Dean, the Republican wing of the Democratic party. But it was impressive from a tactical viewpoint to see such a centrist handling the (I imagine) largely union-educrat audience so well. On Free Trade, for example, he proclaimed his concern for exploited workers worldwide so passionately that I almost didn't notice he was really saying that he wouldn't do a damn thing to help them. That's the kind of savvy you get from working the hustings for decades, and I came away admiring his professionalism, if nothing else about him.

In fact, it was interesting to see how well all the old dogs (Graham partly excepted) performed. The format suits them more than the new school. Kerry is good at smoothly reframing questions to suit his own talking points. When Gephardt's voice rose in a denunciation of Bush that suddenly segued into reminder that he (Gephardt) had worked with BILL CLINTON to GROW THE ECONOMY, I was as aware of the efficacy of the ploy as I was of its transparency.

I don't know if it's a New Mexico thing, but the mix of Spanish and English subtitles and announcements threw me. I appreciate that it must have driven the Peter Brimelow types crazy -- imagine the xenophobic Brit wincing as EX SENADOR DE ILLINOIS appeared under CMB's big, black face! But it seemed like an empty, tokenish gesture. Isn't that was SAP is for? Also, all the candidates more or less endorsed the idea of amnesty for illegals. I would say, in their place: No, amnesty is for people who have done something criminal. I would decriminalize coming to America -- but hold all residents, from the oldest to the newest, to the same standards of law.

Hold your pace, John Edwards. The race has a long way to go and the middle of the pack is a good place to be. But if you get there, it'll be without my help.

IN MY DAY, WE DIDN'T HAVE CAPS TO BUST! I know we asked the last person denouncing Britney and Madonna in a column to turn off the lights when he left. But there's Grandpa from The Boondocks -- I mean, Stanley Crouch -- still sitting in the dark, cursing it. Someone get a flashlight and give Grandpa a hand.

His every -- what, third? Fourth? -- column is about some bad thing on MTV that he hates and why decent people must band together and crush it. This time it's black performers who act like they want to kill you, and female performers who act like they want to fuck you.

"The black thug evolved into a hero because he went against what were dismissed as white middle-class values," sayeth Stanley. "And the prostitute was projected as the liberated woman because she was willing to strut her stuff against all conventions and follow her glands wherever they led her."

You have to admit that he sort of makes some mild, old-man-on-the-porch sense about the ludicrous (or Ludacris) gangsta fronting in hip hop. But it's nuts to ramble about it in a newspaper column, as if it were of any import whatsoever: it's like writing an angry column denouncing pistachio ice cream as an abomination before God.

(Wait, didn't Jim Lileks write one of those? Oh, you follow me, guys -- it's my theme for most of these columns: people who still think the personal is the political, and thereby diminish them both.)

You know, I bet that Crouch guy actually hangs out with black people. But he certainly can't have had any meaningful exposure to females! I mean, I've known some horny chicks, but none who could be said to have "followed her glands."

But that's alright, Gramps, think we got the formula:

• hip hop -- performed by blacks, enjoyed by whites, therefore bad for blacks.
  
• "slut chic" -- indulged by girls, enjoyed by boys, therefore bad for girls.
  

GO BACK TO THE ADIRONDACKS! "New Yorker" R. Brookhiser responding to one of his asshole buddies at National Review Online: "The quotations you cited represent a strain of NYC anti-naturism. But many Gothamites require the country as a place of refuge."

Correction: some Gothamites can afford the country as a place of refuge.

For the rest of us there's Central Park. Prospect Park. Tompkins Square Park. Riverside Park. Flushing Meadows Corona Park...

Not so bad, actually. Beats the hell out of the "refuge" offered by NRO, anyway.

TOUGH. You always expect a little degeneration when an indie (or Insta) fave graduates to the bigtime. But even by the low intellectual standards set by his flagship, the most recent Glenn Reynolds column at msnbc disappoints. A nine-one-one pre-anniversary column consisting mainly of quotes from the malignant Wolfowitz and one of the young men sent to labor on behalf of his delusions! Has the man no shame? Has msnbc no editors?

Of course the combatant is surly toward "those of you who question the righteousness of this conflict." Put in his unfortunate place, any of us might be pleased at the service he was doing the wretches among whom he'd been placed, and take it to mean that the cause was therefore just. You might obtain a similar effect in Bosnia, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, et alia ad nauseum. Which implies that the U.S. Army is now the Peace Corps with bullets and authority for house-to-house searches. It is, as Ward Bond told Jeffrey Hunter in The Searchers, a bitter thing to say, but does this kindness by itself authorize our great and continuing investment of blood, treasure, and national prestige?

We're constantly asked to excuse (and that's the right word) this mad adventure because of the collateral anti-damage. This is portrayed as the "tough" approach. Bullshit. It's the usual domestic "What About the Children?" nonsense applied to foreign policy issues. It would be comical to see the usually hard-eyed Bush Administration, whose "No Child Left Behind" is a notorious dodge stateside, inviting sympathy for the children of Iraq, were this last-ditch pretext for occupation other than pathetic.

I grow weary of humanitarian pretexts and posttexts for foreign interventions. Clinton's Haitian and Bosnian adventures, similarly tricked-up as they were, had more believeable geopolitical rationales -- and if their outcomes, in one or the other case, have proved less than satisfying, at least those failures have been less expensive, and marginally more useful, than the current Iraqi albatross.

Speaking of geopolitics, what's the news from our pals in Saudi Arabia? What? F-15s in Tabuk? Shall we ignore them? What about the children?

RETURN OF THE NAIVE. Andrew Sullivan is aghast that people are calling his President a liar. "...when you start using the term "liar" promiscuously in public discourse, you make such discourse increasingly impossible," says Sullivan. "The term should be reserved only for a conscious and deliberate statement that you know is untrue as you speak or write it. It's rarer than you might think."

Isn't this a bit rich coming from a guy who grew his little bit of fame by publicly denouncing many of his fellow citizens as traitors? How carefully did Sullivan think about the prudence of his claims before he smeared them all over the Blue States?

But I should ease back on him. During that long month in which he cooled his clay feet in P-town, I had forgotten the relevant thing about Sullivan: trying to hook his thoughts one to another, or follow his train of thought past the first station, is like trying to reconstruct a shattered mummy. Best just to wave the vile dust away from one's nostrils.

AND PROUD OF IT! Vice magazine nudnik Gavin McInnes at Buchanan's AmConMag optimistically predicts a conservative renaissance among Young People Today. His evidence is thin ("...only 12 percent of our readers would dare call themselves conservatives -- but that is at least twice what it was five years ago..."), but the case is really sunk by this passage:

Like Toby Young in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People or Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation, we were new immigrants who couldn’t understand why Americans were so determined to favor PC posturing over simple facts.

Bragging on Toby Young as part of your intellectual arsenal is like going to a gunfight and proudly announcing that you have a butter knife.

MORNING IDIOCY. Been too busy to post; the nephew is in town to start college. He's a fine lad and has been granted permanent exemption from any cracks I might make about the Youth of Today.

I got up early and looked around the Web. Much moronism on display, but mostly of the silly, mendacious, and pathetic varieties, not the instructive sort of idiocies upon which this journal feasts.

What do I mean by instructive idiocy? Here, I just found this at The Corner: a trifle that links to a "Broken Windows" Wilson piece called "Cars and their Enemies." The Corner bit is called "Why the Left Hate Cars."

These guys seem to be serious -- at least, serious in the sense of not kidding. "Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics," runs one stupefying Wilson passage. Another: "Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too busy rushing about being critics.)"

And so on. Say this for old BW, though: he doesn't try to pin it all on the Left. In fact, he specifically states that the allegedly antiautomotive view "is by no means one that is confined to the political Left." He does conflate all principled objection to car culture with socialism and Luddism, but at least when he says "critics" he uses the word more or less properly.

The Corner guy, on the other hand, uses it to mean the other side of the aisle in all things. By this view, if you aren't on the Right, you not only (as these guys never tire of asserting) hate America -- you hate Chevys and cheeseburgers and everything else holy and decent.

The nation faces several crises and difficult choices, and credentialed conservatives are still busy with the you-guys-are-no-fun argument. Not a good sign.

WHAT, ME WEIMAR? In the most recent issue of The American Prospect (in articles not available at their website, unfortunately). the TAPpers talk about liberal language and image issues. This is meat and drink to me, but the articles made me a little queasy, particularly "Framing the Dems" by cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who compares the conservative and progressive (big word at TAP these days) worldviews to family models, the "strict father family" and the "nurturant parent family." To underline the point, the editors put in pictures of Robert Duvall as the Great Santini, and Bill Cosby as lovable Cliff Huxtable.

Lakoff makes some good points, but I'm not crazy about family analogies in politics because the analogy inevitably extends (though Lakoff makes little of it) to parents and children. I don't wish to be cast in either role, frankly, especially when social scientists are doing the casting.

Deborah Tannen is a little more on the mark in examining Frank Luntz' linguistic tactics for Republicans. She objects to Luntz' read on the appeal to female voters. Based largely on Bill Clinton's success with the ladies (electorally, I mean), Luntz calls for Republicans to "empathize" with distaff citizens. "Understanding may be all that a woman is looking for when telling her husband or boyfriend about something that frustrated her during the day," Tannen retorts. "But when they go to the polls to elect a leader, women as well as men are not electing a soul mate but a public official..."

Right on, sister. When we talk about politics, it's a good thing to examine the contents of the snake oil our adversaries peddle. But when we start working too seriously on our own formulae -- or counter-formulae -- we run the risk of further debasing our politics, which in the long run does everyone a disservice.

The real sad thing about the California recall is not that it may go badly for our side (by which I of course refer to the candidacy of Gary Coleman). It's that the recall is a circus, politics as entertainment. So too the whole Roy Moore/Ten Commandments fiasco, now being exported to Mississippi. Politainment may amuse bored reporters and disgusted voters, but it should make fans of representative government nervous. Because though a lot of politics is about putting on a good show, it's also about finding consensus and keeping the Republic healthy, and we seem to be veering quickly in the goofball direction.

It's the silly season for sure, but it looks sillier by the minute, and in case you haven't noticed, the country has a lot of real problems. We're not whistling a happy tune, we're whistling in the dark, and the marketability of the tune is beginning to matter less and less.

UNCLE ROY, WHAT'S A "STRAW MAN"? Fetch Uncle Roy down the jug and hit this to get Instapundit telling a tale out of school, or rather out of the Moonie Times. The alleged exchange is between 9/11 TV movie auteur Lionel Chetwynd and, it would seem, a brain-damaged person:

Still, the murmurs of pretty much blanket disapproval I'd been hearing from colleagues about Chetwynd's doing the movie did come to a head during one truly absurd exchange:

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000...Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

"Chetwynd: "Why?"

"Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

The questioner was absolutely serious...

"OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA" chortles the Perfesser.

Let's assume, nephew, that Chetwynd actually met and spoke with this Mallard Fillmore caricature. An amusing anecdote, but what the hell does it demonstrate or portend? It's sort of like my own anecdote:

The overweight Republican dusted off his top hat with the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket and, moving his fat cigar to one side, sneered to me, "Most days, I tell outrageous lies to the American people because it bamboozles them into keeping my pals and I rich and powerful. But on special days like today, I do it simply to further damage an already enfeebled democracy. Moow-wah-ha-ha!"

What! You doubt the veracity of my tale? Can you prove it isn't true? And, by the way, my anecdote shows that Republicans smoke cigars, wear fancy duds, and feast on the misery of the workers. Boo-yah! Advantage: flash fiction as journalism!

DOPE, GUNS, AND FREEPING IN THE STREETS. Atrios has flagged this Free Republic discussion of Arnold's old Oui interview (in which he cheerfully flaunts his casual sex and drug use). I have long harbored a morbid fascination with FR, and so try to stay away from it, lest I get sucked forever into their vortex of anti-logic and magical thinking. But this module's too good to resist.

Sample post:

All I'll say about this is that if Bill Clinton had done the things he did prior to 1977 and reformed his act, I'd never have given him the trouble I did.

Bill Clinton was, is and always will be a diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon.

The posting of this article is unfortunate. I can only shake my head that anyone would think it relevant today.

I made some terrible choices in my youth. I congratulate you if you didn't.

In the Nixon era, Ron Ziegler used the curious locution "mistakes were made" to minimize whatever Administration fuckup he was compelled to explain. Well, now we have a new usage for conservatives who want to excuse behavior that, had it been displayed by their enemies rather than their friends, would cause them to spew tidal waves of abuse: "Terrible choices" have been made.

All over this board, in and among the usual Hillary Clinton fan fiction, you'll observe VRWC factota, usually steadfast against moral relativism in all its forms, experiencing similar, sudden, and glorious conversions to this laissez-faire socially-liberal view -- with exceptions made, of course, for "diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon" Clinton. Love the sin, hate the sinner!

Of course, I'm joking, as in reality this is all Bullshit Libertarianism -- that popular stance adapted by those to who believe in freedom where, when, and for whom it suits themselves (see Carey, Drew). Too bad. If these guys were really listening to themselves, they might undergo a real conversion -- not in politics, perhaps, but in their attitude toward those Commie preverts who do things they wouldn't do except when they did which they wouldn't do now...

KELLY'S HEROES. Funny, when you read Instapundit these days on Britain, it would seem that all the Scepter'd Isle is livid with outrage at the BBC over the Kelly affair. Here's a ripe example of his coverage:

...The Beeb, which just can't seem to avoid sexing up weapons stories... ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon is comparing the BBC to Nixon and to The New York Times...

He also observes that "The Guardian is all over this one." The Guardian, which actually originates in Blighty, is indeed all over the BBC story, and here's a fairly typical excerpt:

[Defense Minister Geoff] Hoon also acknowledged that the BBC report had led to a major political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair and that his government was under tremendous pressure to disprove the BBC's allegations that Blair had exaggerated the risks of Iraq's weapons before the war...

The BBC's allegations -- and the high-profile inquiry being led by Lord Hutton, a senior appeals judge -- pose the worst crisis for Blair in his six years in power, with the latest polls showing that many Britons question his credibility.

Regular IP readers who have heretofore assumed that Blair was as big a hero in Anglia as in Crawford, TX might want to wipe their exploded heads off their monitors now. The BBC may well be having credibility issues, but they're nothing compared to those of the Prime Minister. (Unless of course you believe that, as promulgators of the international liberal media conspiracy, the Beeb is actually more powerful than Blair...)

All goes to show, you can get a bogus idea of international events from even the more widely-puffed weblogs. Come to think of it, drop the "international."

WESLEY WILLIS R.I.P. Wesley Willis, paranoid schizophrenic songwriter, has passed on. A moment of silence, please, for the author of "I Whupped Batman's Ass." Hopefully Daniel Johnston can pick up the slack.

A SMALL THING BUT STILL WORTH NOTING. In a post about cellphone disruptions during the recent blackout, Professor Reynolds comments, "A reader emails that Verizon wireless was up throughout the blackout, unlike other companies. Bravo!"

Someone tell the Professor that Verizon badly botched the NYPD's emergency cell communications that day. The union with which Verizon has been tussling for months suggests that the telecom's personnel cutbacks might have had something to do with it.

Wouldn't surprise me -- Verizon is the worst public utility company with whom I've ever had the misfortune to do business: sloppy, expensive, and rude. But I'll say this for them: they're very good at guerilla marketing, as witnessed by the abovementioned, probably planted message.