THE DIRTY WORK OF CONQUEST. Electrolite points to a horror story in the Independent, about U.S. forces in Iraq destroying groves of rare date palms to punish intranisgent locals.

I suppose the story could be fraudulent or a misinterpretation of facts. It wouldn't be the first time we got fake testimonials from Iraq.

It passes the smell test, anyway. Because even the nicest occupier will sometimes have to play rough with the citizenry.

And we are occupying Iraq. That thought is seldom expressed these days, as we debate the significance of Governor Wolfcastle and what the definition of the word "imminent" is. But we did invade and take over a foreign country, and we are now running it. And this situation will always entail, along with the statue-toppling and the little girls with flowers, the dirty work of conquest.

We can argue about the right and wrong of this particular case, and we have, and we will. But something else is eating at me now, as my attention has been jerked back to the subject by the aforementioned article. This occupation is going to last a while and it's going to cost a lot. The $87 billion is just the tip of the iceberg. Already we're rotating our troops less often, squeezing more out of each serviceman.

So while the question of Administration prevarication is meaningful, it's also kind of important to look at what their malfeasance has got us into. Even if every story about restored schools and liberated children's jails is true, even if this adventure has been a great net plus for the Iraqi people, what will it be, ultimately, for America? Spare me the children's stories of national greatness, and tell me how this will work out better for us than it did for, say, this guy.

THE BRIDGE DECK AT SAN LUIS REY. I used to live on Staten Island, and the less said about it the better, but the ferry trips were the best part of it, especially when I rode home on the exposed starboard bridge deck available on the older vessels, and enjoyed the lovely views of the Jersey coast and the Statue of Liberty. It never occurred to me that the thing could crash. In fact, I was surprised when, a few years back, one of the boats foundered in a storm. I can't even imagine the hull being torn like a tin can on impact, let alone 10 dead and scores horribly injured.

So the report that the Andrew J. Barberi "appeared to speed up when it should have slowed down for docking" is shocking. I recall the pleasureable sensation of the boat reversing its engines and nosing in between the docks; at worst a clumsy entrance meant the sides of the hull would graze the pylons, causing a small, bracing jolt. This occasioned mild groans, gasps, and laughter among the passengers, especially those of us on the foredeck. That must have been what the Barberi passengers were expecting till the last moments, and I shudder to envision myself among them -- or, for that matter, in the place of the pilot, who apparently tried to kill himself after the accident.

There's a guy in Chicago suffering mightily because he tried to catch a foul ball two nights back and appeared, in the superstitious world of baseball, to fatally reverse the Cubs' momentum in the playoffs. I hope he and his fellow Cub fans understand that fate deals blows hard and soft, according to cosmic whims far beyond our ken, and that this constant rain of suffering is only alleviated by good luck and mercy.

THEY'RE ALL AGAINST US! "Not reviewing Coloring the News was, in my view, the journalistic equivalent to the 'blue wall of silence' that the Times often decries..."

...writes the author of Coloring the News.

Later on, a "friend who works at the New York Times" tells this author, quote, "We're gutless careerists. What can I say? The treatment your book got dramatizes the power that liberals have to dominate the discourse and to shut down--or try to shut down--dissidents or those who have alternative points of view."

Quite a mouthful. I would discourage Mr, Goldberg from applying his talents to the dramatic field until he learns to write dialogue that doesn't sound like a political version of the "I Am Muscular Dystrophy and I Hate People, Especially Little Children" monologue they used to do on the Jerry Lewis Telethons.

My own writings are also sadly neglected. I blame Bush.

WHEN BLOWHARDS ATTACK! I thought for sure this Thomas Hibbs thing would be the stupidest piece of written on the subject of Kill Bill:

Now, Tarantino is to be credited with forcing on his viewers a cognitive awareness of his film's liturgy of blood. The question is whether the surface irony is sufficient to justify the willing suspension of moral judgment, not moral judgments about the film's hypothetical causal effects on the behavior of already deranged adolescents but the indispensably moral element we bring to any work of art.

Makes Immanuel Kant sound like the Yellow Kid! But then this monstrosity emerged from the swamp, spewing hyperbole, and topped it:

Set aside what it says about contemporary Hollywood culture that the supposed liberal progressives of this city now ceaselessly mass-market presentations of butchering the helpless as a form of entertainment, even, as rewarding self-expression. Why do we suppose that, with Hollywood's violence-glorifying films now shown all around the world to billions of people... young terrorists around the globe now seem to view killing the innocent as a positive thing, even, a norm?

Me, I had already planned to give Kill Bill a miss, not because it causes terrorism, but because Tarantino sort of sucks.

YANKEES GO HOME. Jonah Goldberg has a long thing decrying the New York Times for backing a Sox-Cubs series. That the Good Grey Lady has money tied up in the Boston franchise does surprise me, but hey, that's capitalism, comrade. (Cut to Grady Little, wearing a Soviet uniform and leering: "The Yankees will buy us the horsehide with which Pedro Martinez will bean them!")

But Goldberg is mostly annoyed because the unexpected stance shows a lack of loyalty, which is "Cosmopolitan" -- not the good kind of Cosmopolitanism one sees in New York takeout menus, he explains, but the bad kind that makes you not care about nothin', and vote Democratic. Plus which, it's arrogant. "The Times is deciding what is best for the world," he says.

Two things. First of all, didn't Peggy Noonan tell us years ago that the "Democrats, God bless them, are Yankees"? Maybe the Times is just trying to show some editorial balance. First they hire David Brooks, now they turn against the Democratic Yankees.

Second, I think there's a simpler explanation. There are many New Yorkers who don't care for the Yankees. Some of us are Mets fans who, in our suffering, do not appreciate -- are in fact damned annoyed by -- the giant-foam-finger triumphalism of the Bombers. Frankly, any pretext for a Yankee pratfall would be okay by us, but how much better if it leads to a Series between two venerable clubs who have waited long decades for this moment?

I mean, Mike Bloomberg is in New York, too, and I don't particularly like him.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. I must thank Tim Graham for directing my attention to a hilarious Jimmy Breslin column, in which a junkie freshly released from Rikers seeks to replace Rush Limbaugh on WABC. (Of course, Graham does not approve of the column, but he does show us where it is, and that's good enough for me. Thanks, pal!)

Among Breslin's comments: "Until I found out Limbaugh was an addict on Hillbilly Heroin, which means you can call him a junkie, I couldn't understand how he could keep repeating the same lies day after day. Suddenly, we find that it wasn't Rush the right-wing radical talking. This was just a junkie's babble..."

Now, we're not supposed to laugh at poor Limbaugh. All kinds of former red-meat conservatives who bared their fangs when, say, Jesse Jackson was brought low have rallied 'round Rush, bemoaning his harsh treatment by the SCLM. "His enemies in the mainstream media have greeted his statement with nothing short of outright glee," blubbers John Podhoretz, who then, with astonishing chutzpah, lectures Rush's enemies on tolerance: "Present-day conservatives have our own brand of tolerance and compassion -- and we think they run deeper and are far less condescending than the liberal variety," he ungrammatically but passionately argues. "[Limbaugh] reserved his compassion for those whose tragic life experiences have been formed by the culture of welfare dependency... liberal racists who believe minorities cannot possibly succeed in America without special privileges and special help." (Indeed. Who can forget such vintage Rush bootstrap-philosophical perorations as "Take the bone out of your nose and call me back"?)

Taking pleasure in the fall of moral blowhards has been a lively pastime since before the days of Moliere. It was once even enjoyed by conservatives. And I imagine they'll get back to it after this little, um, interval.

I AM A CLICHE. "Roy Edroso is a really truly New York snarkster of the old school which I also like in a person." This assessment by Sisyphus Shrugged is depressingly accurate, especially when I'm drinking, even among the sunny lefty bloggers who gathered in New York on Friday to exponentiate their lofty thoughts. They were all very smart, sociable people, and I was struck by their similarity in this regard to the conservative bloggers I met at Sasha Castel's New York do last November. Of course, conservatives tend to dress up a little more and to order more expensive entrees. And they're wrong. But these are not crucial distinctions. It might be fun to see them all at a party together. Well, I'm not about to organize that, having been the linch-pin of too many debacles already, but maybe someone else has got sufficient mischief in his soul, and connections, to make it happen.

BUSH (AND BUTT) LIES. Another playful little entry at Instapundit about that fabled "Bush hatred":

UPDATE: Jim Treacher demolishes another alleged example of the same phenomenon, in this case an article blaming George Bush for low-hanging pants on women... Note to fashion writers: If you want to see Bush cement his hold on the male vote, just keep "blaming" him for skimpy women's fashions.

Idle curiosity led me to the link to Jim Treacher, whose money quote from the Slate thumbsucker in question is "Our economy is bad; we're entrenched in an occupation abroad; we mistrust our government at home." That article also mentions Chinese foot-binding, meralgia paresthetica, and Natural Born Killers.

All very silly and a typical example of overdetermined culture-watching and the need to fill pages at regular intervals. But who takes this stuff seriously? I sure don't, and I'm willing to believe nearly anything bad about Bush. I doubt even the author gave it much thought. (I hope not, for her sake.)

Treacher, though, goes ballistic: "It's George W. Bush's fault, just like everything else! WMD = Wow, Mamalicious Dimples! I mean, check it out, his name is BUSH. That's why chicks want to walk around with their BUSH sticking out. Get it?"

All told, Treacher's direct mentions of Bush (and bush) outnumber Slate's, five to zero. IP is reacting to Treacher, so by the time this bagatelle gets the major-blogger spotlight, it's perceived as another bleat of Bush hatred from the wimpified masses of liberal sheeple.

The blogosphere increasingly resembles the old gossip game "Telephone." I lament my own part in it, but I can't seem to stop myself either. Maybe it's time, in the words of the late lamented Donald O'Connor, to start suffering and write that symphony. Or, alternately, to stop suffering and write that symphony. Or anything else.

NEGRO PROBLEM. At NRO's The Corner this morning, Jonah Goldberg addresses a black person. Is this a first? Here is some of JG's response to a TAPPED post by Melanie Alston-Akers (the subject is a Hillsdale College ad about which no sane person gives a shit):

I'm sure it's possible that other blacks of different political persuasions, including conservatives, would draw the same conclusion as her about the ad. I am also sure that many blacks would not (I know this because I heard from some). I do not think those blacks are any less authentically black.

If you haven't read Alston-Akers' original post, you might assume from Goldberg's bit about the "authentically black" that she had accused Af-Ams who disagreed with her of Tomming or Oreohood. If you have read it, you know that she made no such claim -- unless you are of the sort who believes he knows the Angry Negro script backwards, and so just substitutes bits of it for the actual words of the darker person speaking.

What is it with this guy and black people?

THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING. George F. Will is pissed. "California's recall," he correctly notes, "[was] a riot of millionaires masquerading as a 'revolt of the people.'" (Quick, NROers! Send someone to The Corner to accuse Will of making class war!) Plenty more vinegar further down: "Schwarzenegger conservatives -- now, there is an oxymoron for these times..." "voters full of self-pity and indignation," etc.

I don't much like Will, but I have to admire his stay, as they used to call it. He's one of the few conservatives who does not undergo a sudden philosophical transformation whenever he thinks of Rainier Wolfcastle. He believes today what he believed last month, and so is appalled to see many former scourges of Clinton and preachers of governmental responsibility sucking up to a tit-grabbing power freak who has so far resisted any explanation of his gubernatorial action plan (unless you count waving that broom).

This is just another symptom of the growing politicization of everything. The sane response to the election would be, from Democrats, "too bad we lost," and from Republicans, "too good we won." But victory and loss are too binary for the electoral tea-leaf-readers, who have grown so numerous as to necessitate the creation of endless niche ideologies to accomodate their careers: would you like a gay post-Reagan English conservative, or a deranged Jewish former Black Panther? Or would Madame care to see something in a bullshit liberal?

So the recall is crushed and sifted and some conservatives decide it points the way to their future. Tireless GOP cheerleader Deborah Orin speaks in the New York Post of a "Terminator wing of the Republican Party " that will succeed by aping the examples of Wolfcastle and Giuliani. So, I guess if Bush gets in trouble next year, he can just feel up Condi Rice and divorce his wife for a quick electoral boost.

Most of the time I'm disgusted by what these people believe in, but increasingly I find that I am disgusted at nothing.

MORE BULLSHIT about how Tom Brokaw et alia are fighting for Saddam from General Ralph Peters. A sample:

Far too many journalists refuse to acknowledge the truth about their role in this age of endless news cycles and global access to reportage. Even when reporters don't make up the news, they make the news by selecting what they report.

Stop the presses -- Stories Revealed to Have "Angles"! Nuttier still is the notion of a "role" for the press, which Peters later expands with "the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence." Dig below the permafrost of the General's hauteur and you'll see a fairly old-fashioned view of those who express views contrary to that of the state. Perhaps the General thinks the New York Times is run like Stars & Stripes. (Of course, not even George Patton could get Bill Mauldin kicked off S&S back in the day, so maybe the General has a different journalistic model in mind -- one that predates John Peter Zenger.)

BALLOT INITIATIVES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE. Few political boundaries can withstand star appeal. Already conservative backers of Governor Wolfcastle are making pre-emptive excuses for his upcoming term.

Mickey Kaus:

You want a tax increase if cutting the budget isn't enough to close the deficit? Schwarzenegger's the man for that too. As a nominal Republican, he is in a position to attract at least some Republican votes for a budget package that includes both taxes and cuts.

Quick, class -- what is the single issue that Wolfcastle ran on? Tax cuts! Very good! Well, in the immortal words of the Alleycats, nothing means nothing anymore.

More interesting is Kaus' suggestion that Wolfcastle move to "amend the state Constitution to get rid of the paralyzing requirement that two-thirds of the legislature approve any budget." If the two-thirds rule has any logic at all, it is that it makes it harder for larcenous political coalitions to hijack a budget. If Wolfcastle were to muscle this provision out of the state Constitution, it would not be for the benefit of the state's economy, but for the benefit of Two-Term Arnold.

A more breathtaking scam is proposed by David Frum. "Schwarzenegger won’t be able to change California," he deadpans, "unless he changes the way in which California is governed." Frum then proposes the death of Cali's easy ballot initiatives. "These constitutionally protected programs take priority over everything else the state does, including things that are less glamorous but more important... Schwarzenegger knows this well: after all, he entered politics with his own poll-tested budget proposal..." [emphasis mine].

If Arnold makes a terrible botch of things -- not an unimaginable event -- look for Frum to endorse an end to California's terribly unhelpful recall provisions.

MEME-ORIES LIGHT THE CORNER OF MY MIND. The golden days of the Fifth Column seemed to have passed. Things had been quiet along the traitor-baiting front, and conservatives had been content to portray liberals as, say, sex-fiends or as sissies, rather than as enemies of the state.

Now Bob Bartley comes running out of the woods hollering Hoo-ah! Let's do it again!:

...having won overwhelming public support, [Bush]now faces home-front guerrilla assaults as well.

The latter problem is the serious one. With press coverage starting to balance the good news and the bad, we're coming to understand that on the ground in Iraq the guerrillas are isolated. The Baathist remnants and Arab militants have nothing like the external sanctuary and superpower support that sustained the North Vietnamese and anti-Soviet Afghans. For the moment terrorists can still ambush Americans and assassinate pro-peace Iraqi leaders, but exhausting them is only a matter of time and patience.

Which of course is where the home-front guerrillas come in.

I think I may have heard a couple of other guys saying that liberals were giving aid and comfort to the enemy by saying mean things about Bush, but at the time I thought it was flashbacks. Can the eminence gris of Opinion Journal guide wingers back onto this particular warpath? I'll be watching with interest, and my passport handy.

NEO NUDNIKS. I must quickly fling some scorn on the New York Times Magazine's "Neo-70s" issue, which promotes the harebrained idea that because some 21-year-olds are wearing bro caps and bellbottoms, we are "doing" the 1970s again -- except without the sex, the drugs, the fun, or the talent.

Leading this badly misguided clue hunt is a stupefyingly bad essay by James Traub (registration required, dammit). This dweeb moved to New York the same year I did, but remembers the old days only as a series of muggings and murders, and says of our current, homogenized era, "If that was Yuppified, I'd take it" (in response to the only dissenting voice in his story, described only as "an aging hippie"). 70s New York, theorizes Traub, was Martin Scorcese; 90s New York is Neil LaBute. Yet still he defends that great lattefication! "The bourgeois bohemians, in David Brooks's pungent phrase," gushes Traub, "have turned areas that were no-go zones when I first came to New York into outposts of boutiquedom."

Then, after some obligatory Rudy-kissing ("New York got its swagger back: Giuliani rode high in the saddle..."), Traub begins to notice a problem -- businesses are leaving. (It would seem that, in the Traubian vision, all that is New York hinges on the migration patterns of banks and brokerage firms.) And without the big, big money, where will we get latte consumers? "The question," Traub says, in a sentence the hopefulness of which degenerates in an almost beautiful way, "really comes down to whether the city can not only attract but also keep all those bright, eager, ambitious people who flock here, despite the high taxes, the restrictive regulations, the sky-high real-estate prices, the poor schools, the deteriorating services."

I thank Traub for a good laugh there, but my gorge rises again at his suggestion (delivered quickly, as if the author had suddenly noticed the near-fulfillment of his word count) that our city's solution may be "more theater, more cafes, more bookshops." (Hey, kids, let's put on some Neil LaBute!) "Let the bankers leave for Stamford; we'll make do with the radio-car drivers, the bartenders and the graphic designers."

You fucking Yuppie dipshit. You and your asshole friends drove our rents through the roof -- now who can afford to open a theatre? And even if we had access to a theatre (or a dance studio, or a film collective, etc), how could we afford to do anything other than the most explicitly commercial work, the cost of living here being what it is? You made this nightmare for us, and now you're willing to wave it off and decree that a cultural renaissance is in order. Tell me, when you came here (maybe on the same train as me), did you begin immediately to brown-nose the Times' management? Then you probably have a nice financial package to insulate you against the worsening economic times. So you'll forgive the rest of us -- "the radio-car drivers, the bartenders and the graphic designers," not to mention the actors, writers, musicians, etc., for not sharing your sangfroid. I'll say this, though: if the murderers, junkies, squeegee men, et alia do come back, I'll kiss the motherfuckers if they manage to drive you and everyone like you out of my city.

GUN NUTTINESS. Instapundit suggests that an alleged drop in the American murder rate (I say "alleged" because his source is the Washington Times) shows that "liberalized handgun-carry laws" aren't a bad thing. An arguable point, but instead of developing it, the Ole Perfesser decides to gild his lily by gloating over an increase in gun crimes in Britain "despite a near-complete handgun ban."

I'll say this for the Second Amendment folks -- they aren't selfish: they want gun rights not only for themselves but for everyone, including those who don't want them at all.

If the idea here is to assert that the more guns you have, the less crime you have, I have to ask if the Perfesser has ever heard of a small community called New York City. Here we have experienced huge drops in the murder rate several years running. It may surprise the Perfesser to note that this was not achieved by handing out service revolvers to the citizenry. Quite the contrary:

The NYPD gun strategy uses felony arrests and summonses to target gun trafficking and gun-related crime in the city. NYPD pursues all perpetrators and accomplices in gun crimes cases and interrogates them about how their guns were acquired. In a proactive effort to get guns off the streets, the NYPD's Street Crime Units aggressively enforce all gun laws.

Also, "New York City has some of the most restrictive local licensing requirements for Federal firearm dealers in the country."

By the Perfesser's logic, we should be drowning in our own blood, and our few surviving citizens begging him and his hayseed brethren to throw us a cache of weapons to stop the violence.

I am willing to accept that, as a citizen of a great metropolis, I'm not always sensitive to the ways and means of folks living in the vast Central Suburbs. I just wish they'd show us the same consideration sometimes.

ADDENDUM. Somebody has responded to this bit with mild, Vermont-style demurrers on gun rights in general. I had imagined that my earlier essay on the subject was so widely known that it didn't need mentioning, but I see now that I was deluded. I'm pretty cool with the Second Amendment. I don't think gun laws are necessarily good or bad -- I think the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad. What's a good gun law? Roughly, one that doesn't interfere with your right to bear arms or the legitimate government function of keeping the commons safe (i.e., free of crime sprees and casual violence). I swear this Venn diagram shows a lot more overlap if you look at it from a disinterested POV.

MOVIE NIGHTS. I've been called a crank, and can't deny it, but I'm a crank like Dennis Hopper was an asshole in Out of the Blue. "You think I'm an asshole!" he roared as he poured his own beer over his head. "Alright! I'm an asshole!" Then he showed that he hadn't poured the entire beer over his head. "But," said Hopper, "I'm not a fucking asshole!"

I am not a fucking crank, and so enjoyed School of Rock this weekend. It has no characters to speak of, and nothing is at stake; all the plot complications are laughable, as are the Lessons in Life. (Fancy Jack Black telling anyone that rock isn't at least partly about sex and drugs.)

But the movie is a crisp bit of product with a great idea in the middle. Actually I think you have to have a bit of crank in you to fully appreciate it. (I'm not talking about meth, but I suppose that would help too if you could sit still long enough to watch the thing.) Because the idea that kids today need to be schooled in the art of rock is very cranky. It's epiphanic for greybeards such as myself when Black asks what the kids like and they uniformly cite unspeakably lame contemporary radio staples -- and Black cries, "What are they teaching you in this school?" and draws up a flow-chart of rock history. Robert Christgau couldn't have cranked it up better.

The movie panders L.A.M.F., but surprise, it's me and mine that are being pandered to. About time! So I raise my goblet of rock to it.

Also saw Lost in Translation, aka Antonioni for Dummies. Murray and Johansson are cute, but I wonder how the movie would have worked if everyone they loved or came in contact with hadn't been such morons.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S ANALYTIC METHOD REVEALED. "Surely, spending a billion dollars to turn around one criminal is too much, even if it would work. No one's proposing spending a billion dollars per prisoner, but the point remains the same. "

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT NEEDS NO SNAPPY HEADLINE. "A White House official I spoke to was particularly pleased by the increased hiring of temporary workers, which he sees as a good sign about robust economic growth to come." -- Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO.

CAL GOP SCRAMBLES FOR COUNTERSCANDALS! Via the Right's most reliable apparatchik, this story about Carl Reiner (!) on Chris Matthews (!?) is headed down the media stream:

What Reiner said, with a kind of comfortable, humorous familiarity, was "Shfartze-negger"...

Reiner returned to a modified, less-offensive version of the pronounciation later in the conversation, but what remains recorded for all to hear is kind of ugly. The first half of "Shfartze-negger" is the Yiddish version of the N-word. The second, appended to the first half with humorous irony, was apparently intended to mean what it sounded like.

So, if I understand this correctly, the guy thinks Reiner called Schwarzenegger a nigger.

Sorry, try again.

A CULTURAL DISADVANTAGE. Speaking on Rush Limbaugh's idiotic comments about the Philly QB, Jay Nordlinger makes this interesting statement:

I’m reminded of something that I’ve discovered in recent years. I work in Conservativeland, and I’m used to speaking freely. I’m used to not having to abide by a speech code or any other restriction of political correctness. And then sometimes I leave Conservativeland, and continue to speak freely--and sincerely--and then find that I startle people. They’re not used to hearing it.

Well, that's right, we're not. The Mother of All Dittoheads goes out in front of millions of sports fans and says -- freely, certainly; sincerely, who knows -- that McNab hasn't been "that good from the get-go. I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well." And those of us who are not convinced that a pro-Negro conspiracy, aided and abetted by the liberal media, has foisted an unskilled quarterback on the unwilling Eagles, are startled.

Meanwhile another Limbaugh, David, tells the world that liberals are "waging an undeclared war on Christianity." The book's cover is graced by a lion, apparently comparing the plight of American Christians to that of the biblical Daniel. Piquant as I find the thought that Ted Kennedy, the ACLU, and a handful of others have got the Prince of Peace and his millions of adherents on the ropes, I cannot take it seriously for a second -- even after no less keen an observer than Ann Coulter has told me that Limbaugh's book "makes you cry for your country" and "wonder how much longer America can survive liberalism." In fact, I cry with laughter, and wonder how anyone, in a land bejewelled with churches, and led by a President who talks about Jesus all the time, could believe such hooey.

I am equally mystified by the invitation by Ned Flanders (aka Rod Dreher) of the Dallas Morning News (registration required) to weep for conservative journalists. In the "overwhelmingly secular" atmosphere of newsrooms, Flanders tells the huddled, shivering conservative scribes, "you will have to distinguish yourself by the strength of your writing and reporting." Not like those liberal journalists, who merely have to commit sacrileges for their paychecks. (Flanders, by the way, preceded his Dallas stint with plum gigs at the New York Post and the National Review, so I'd say he's wearing his persecution remarkably well.)

You'd think that after all the time I've spent in Conservativeland, merrily mining such profound observations as the abovementioned for this site, that their free-thinking ways have not rubbed off on me. Yet, when I see an underperforming black professional athlete, I don't assume he is employed merely as a token; I remain unconvinced that Christians are about to be holocausted by the Democratic Party; and I marvel that an industry dominated by Fox News can be called unwelcoming of right-wing reporters.

Must be a cultural thing.