MR. SULLIVAN'S PLANET. In his latest article, Andrew Sullivan tells us that America is divided between those "baby boomers" who "see everything" through the "prism" of Vietnam and are destined to lose the entire south and the next Presidential election, and regular people like himself.

Taking care to be fair and balanced, Sullivan admits, after reproducing a long, incendiary and (if you know anything about the source) anomalous screed from Democratic Underground, that "Free Republic... is sometimes just as outrageous in the other direction as Democratic Underground."

Yes, he's talking about that Free Republic, at which members commemorate Lincoln's Birthday by toasting John Wilkes Booth, and would likely beat hell out of Sullivan if he stumbled upon their trailer park. (Representative post from a recent Freeper board: "...most queers aren't neat and pretty like tha' teevee shows either. Might as well stereotype them as lazy, self-absorbed, perverted, and living in pig sty apartments that reek of chain smoking and overfilled trash cans -- because that's what a lot of them are and that's where a lot of the queers live. Or better yet, why not take a tour of the AIDS wing of a large metropolitan hospital and set it to a laugh-track...")

Oh, and Sullivan thinks that Bush might lose "if he nominates a real extremist to the Supreme Court or backs a Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage." Yeah, that'll alienate his base, alright.

I used to wonder what planet Sullivan was from, but now I'm thinking in terms of galaxies.

P.S. Sullivan also says, "[Dean's] from Vermont, one of the home bases of what's being called 'the Starbucks Metrosexual elite.'" "Called" by whom besides Sullivan?

MILOS FORMAN WAS RIGHT. Larry Flynt claims to have nude pictures of Jessica Lynch, and to have procured them soley to keep them out of circulation, and thus spare from further degradation the Iraq War's most famous POW, whom Flynt feels has already been exploited enough by the Bush Administration.

I don't believe him, but you have to admire the showmanship. Some men will enjoy even the idea that the photos exist; some who do not enjoy the idea will still wonder if the photos exist; others will decry the whole concept as violently as if the photos exist. Thus Flynt has associated himself with a pornographic scoop that does not exist. Whotta demon!

I prefer this kind of buncombe to the kind dispensed by more diligent shapers of public opinion, and not only because it involves porn. While Roger Ailes and his drones, for example, methodically enforce their own version of political correctness among the serfs at Fox News, Flynt steps up like P.T. Barnum with an outrageous public claim that deftly mixes equal parts of concupiscence and sanctimony. One offense to reason and decency smells of the carnival tent, and promises at least a little cheer with the cheat; the other smells of Wite-Out and expensive cologne, and bores mercilessly into the skull, not caring to stop and tickle anyone's fancy along the way, lest they fall off-message.

Flynt's approach is, dare I say it, more American, and Ailes' more Orwellian. There is after all a difference between bullshit and Newspeak.

BOOTS ON FIFTH. I spent my lunch break today at the Veteran's Day Parade. I'd heard this event is always sparsely attended, and I was prepared to be depressed by the sight of aged warriors hobbling up Fifth Avenue as gaggles of seniors feebly clapped. But while this year's Parade certainly won't set any attendance records, that didn't seem to matter, because the vets were rocking. Didn't matter that St. Patrick's and Gay Pride are bigger and brassier. The vets had their parade. They hoisted the flag, worked the rifle, and styled their peacoats and camo with brio. Even the old ones had some spring in their step; even the ones bearing the POW-MIA flag had an upright and energized bearing.

I'm sure they'd have preferred huge, cheering throngs, but fuck it -- they've been through a lot worse than a weak house. Though many of the NYPD sawhorses held back naught but November air, and what applause we spectators raised died fast in the concrete corridors, the marchers waved and smiled and, when they recognized a brother on the sidelines, saluted.

There were representatives of all the services (I think -- didn't see any sailors), and of particular squads and special interests. There was an equal-rights group that flew the Pride flag next to Old Glory. There were guys carrying rifles as if on point, and others who slung them carelessly over their shoulders. There was a group of Bronx Vietnam vets who looked like they got back yesterday. There were Veterans Against The War, chanting BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED -- I wonder if the guys down at the New York Post who bitched today about poor V-Day attendance caught this act, or showed up at all. And there were high school marching bands playing the American military's greatest hits (including "Onward Christian Soldiers"), baton twirlers, and honor guards.

It wasn't all high spirits and happy faces. The POW-MIA flags, once an urgent distress signal for men presumably left behind, now seems a bitter reminder that soldiers know well whom they can and can’t count on. One improvised "float" featured a bamboo tiger-cage with tattered fatigues hanging in it. On the side of an armored vehicle read this legend: NEVER AGAIN WILL ONE GROUP OF VETERANS ABANDON ANOTHER.

It struck me that while the Parade does honor the fallen, it also honors the folks who came back from our wars, who must feel not only proud but lucky. These guys sure seemed to feel that way -- lucky to be alive, to hear and feel their boots tromping on safe concrete, to smell the tang of autumn. Having never served (too young for Nam, by the grace of God), I feel lucky, too; and I acknowledge that these guys, and their absent friends, may have bought me some of that luck.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK. "Kidman To Keep Kravitz Romance Private," TeenHollywood.com.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. This recent piece of Virginia Postrel gush is about the new architectural template for Home Depot stores. Postrel posits that the "higher aesthetic expectations" of "urbanites" have led to this design marvel, and backs it up with a passage from the Engineering News-Record and a photo.

The News-Record does concur that "shoppers are flocking to buildings that are navigable, organized and well-maintained." The photo, however, forces me to make an observation: the buildings, if this is a reliable example, are butt ugly.

Now, to a Dynamist, I'm sure this is judgment is incomprehensible, or comprehensible only as a pathetic dying yawp from the withering tribe of The Future's Enemies who cannot see heaven in a box of steel, stone, and glass, however ergonomically sound.

But fuck it. I say they're eyesores and I say the hell with them.

P.S. I also think Philip Glass and Blink-182 are clearly inferior to the dusty, low-tech creations of Beethoven and Iggy and the Stooges.

'TIS A BLESSING TO BE SIMPLE. "FOR DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST: ARABS... AGAINST: NYT, GUARDIAN, AND THE LEFT." -- OxBlog. Writing must be easier to do when you are not simultaneously obliged to think.

IT'S OKAY, BUT IT'S NO MALLARD FILLMORE. Zara Downs tipped me to this unique series of instructional comics from Law for Kids. Even more curious than the authors' idea of a good gag-panel punchline ("You are both suspended") is the whole idea of Law for Kids, "America's first stand alone web site dedicated to teaching children about the law." Is the presumption here that first-graders need legal counselling, or that teenagers read at a first-grade level?

NEW FRONTIERS IN WINGNUTTERY. Andrew Sullivan comes thisclose to calling George Soros, a Jew, an anti-Semite. God, what torture it must have been for Sullivan: he had the Right-wing slur of the moment all ready, and couldn't use it because his adversary possessed ethnic kryptonite!

Perhaps Sullivan can take comfort in the news that Putin's boys are dealing with this troublesome billionaire the old-fashioned way.

VERY EASY COMPOSITION TEST. Class, tell us what's wrong with this sentence from the Wall Street Journal's editorial about why Souterners won't vote Democratic:

And far from playing the race card, most [Southern] Republican candidates nowadays strive to avoid making race an issue, if only because they don't want to boost largely Democratic black turnout.

Answer: The sentence is too long and should be edited to carry only the words needed to carry its meaning, e.g., "Southern Republicans don't speak their minds about race, because black people would kick their ass if they did."

Of course, in this new version, one also loses the reference to "playing the race card," which in the original implies this cowardly course of action is in fact a form of courage.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG ON CITIZEN KANE: In order to maintain my reputation as a young, hip conservative, I will affect boredom with a famously brilliant American film and pretend to prefer a Patrick Swayze action picture. That's, like, way iconoclastic!

OVER TO YOU, BILL. I ought to read Whiskey Bar more often. Billmon makes an excellent point about Bush's NED speech -- which, like all Bush orations, has already received gushing fanboy treatment from Sullivan and those guys.

Of course, Billmon and Sullivan seem to be talking about different speeches. The one Sullivan heard reveals that "The fundamental lesson of 9/11" is that "it [is] no longer possible for the West to ignore or enable the poisonous and dangerous trends in the Middle East." But Billmon points out that Bush's speech was actually quite sanguine about freedom's hopes in that region, and rang with praises of allegedly incipient democracies in the Middle East -- including, rather hilariously, Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, Bush criticized Iran's government, which he commanded to "heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people." Here's what Billmon made of that:

Even for Shrub, this is hutzpah. For all its obvious flaws, Iran is a hell of a lot more democratic than any of the feudal oil kingdoms Bush cited in his speech. It has a real parliament, with substantive budgetary and oversight powers, holds real elections, and has a president who can stake a stronger claim to a popular mandate than having the votes of five Supreme Court justices.

The problem with Iranian democracy, of course, is the theocratic veto given to the Shi'a religious establishment, which has managed to frustrate most, but not all, efforts at popular reform. But does Bush really propose to argue that the Ayatollah Khamenei is less legitimate than the semi-comatose side of beef currently sitting on the Saudi throne? Bush cites the example of Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize winner. In Saudi Arabia, she'd be horsewhipped by the religious police for even showing her face in public.

I mention all this not just to flog a blog, or even to draw your attention to a neat peiece of rational analysis of the sort I am usually too bile-choked to attempt. It's also an experiment in blogging efficiency. I am tired this week, and believe me, it is easier to find smart stuff on the web, link to it, and add a few words of set-up, than it is the delve into the psychological rat's-nests of this world's Kim Du Toits, Ralph Peterses, et alia, as I normally do. In fact, if I stopped devoting such craft and style as I have on the set-up here, I could easily do this all day long, and maintain a tenured position at the University of Tennessee.

BLOOD 'N' GUTS REDUX. After yesterday's rousing column, I thought General Ralph Peters' minders would have insisted on a week of bedrest for him at least. Yet here he is again with an even more enraged article. For if there's one thing that gets Peters' goat worse that Iraqis firing on Americans, it's Germans.

Peters has had this bee in his helmet for some time -- here, for instance, he tells us that Germans are loud and smell bad. But now the General has an excuse, sort of: a German general named Guenzel got caught passing some anti-Semitic remarks.

Guenzel was summarily fired, and denounced by the Chancellor, but Peters insists that "millions of Germans" also hate the Jews -- in fact, to hear Peters tell it, all citizens of Germany hate Jews:

There are good Germans. Plenty of them. But they live in Philadelphia, not Frankfurt. They and their ancestors all left Germany by 1938. Those who stayed didn't just support Hitler - they loved him and fought for him to the bitter end...

The whopping difference between the Allied occupation of Germany and our occupation of Iraq is that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis welcomed their liberation. We had to force freedom and democracy on the Germans at gunpoint.

They'll never forgive us...

Right off the bat, this prompts a question: do German Jews, being German, also hate Jews? But we know better than to interrupt the General.

On he rages, explaining that a lot of the universal anti-Semitism of Germans is craftily hidden: "Oh, sure, making anti-Semitic remarks is a crime in today's Germany. But anti-Israeli remarks are just fine. You've merely got to choose your words carefully."

Of course, stateside we are well-used to this mad idea that criticism of Israeli policy = the blood libel. But why would anti-Semitic Germany have such notoriously strong laws against anti-Semitic speech -- and try so hard to get the rest of the world to follow them? Shouldn't they instead be pushing a free-speech line, in hopes that their children may one day be allowed to watch Jud Suss and yell ethnic slurs?

Again, there's no containing the General. His conclusion: we must boycott Germany as we boycotted France. "The boycott of French wine sent a strong message," avers Peters. Well, considering that, as Reuters reported, "Americans overtook Germans as the biggest spenders on France's Bordeaux wines in the 2002-03 sales year," that message must be that Americans are too fucking self-indulgent to stage a decent boycott.

I was at first disposed to declare Peters mad. He has all the attributes of a lunatic: he has strongly fixed ideas about people that experience cannot dispel, he takes chimeras for hard facts, and he is in a perpetual state of rage. But I haven't shaken the feeling that perhaps Peters is playing a different game: maybe he's just deliberately inattentive to facts and reason, not because he's nuts but because he's aware that his function is to stimulate anger at selected enemies rather than rational debate.

The "either evil or crazy" formulation, though, I could live with.

KIM? ISN'T THAT A GIRL'S NAME? It's never a good sign when the Ole Perfesser does a long post, but this one represents a new low ("Have you got that, Mr. Bernstein? A new low!").

In some ways it's the usual Reynolds rap -- a lot of bizarre, offhand assertions ("I wonder, though, if this phenomenon doesn't go part of the way toward explaining why network TV is losing so many male viewers") interrupted by quotes from dopes and links to dinks -- but here the premise is so ridiculous (basically, that men have it rough, and the bitches get everything their way) that you wonder why he bothered to type it instead of just getting shitfaced and blurting it out on the street while smashing beer bottles.

Also, at this length, it's more obvious than usual that he doesn't know how to build an argument, or even what an argument is. (You say this guy teaches law?)

But rank as his stuff is, the inspiration for his post is even worse: a guy whose unfortunate name, Kim Du Toit, seems to have scarred him for life. As pictured at his site, Du Toit looks like Floyd the Barber after a weekend in Paris ("Oooh, Andy! Such wonderful little cafes they had there -- ooh, but their hair was so messy!"), and writes like -- well, there's almost no describing it. Put it this way, though: If I washed a dozen percoset down with a bottle of Jim Beam, and had to write with a magic marker that was sticking out of my ass, I'd still do better than this guy.

Not to waste too much of your time, but here are the two most illustrative examples:

"...in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media -- and mostly, this has not been a good thing."

And:

"I'm going to illustrate this by talking about TV, because TV is a reliable barometer of our culture."

I'll say this for most self-styled he-men: at least they attempt to back up their claims at supermanhood with entertaining stories about drinking, fucking, and fighting. This guy just wants to talk about TV.

The fact that this nerd is getting play in the blogosphere (if, self-evidently, not in the sack with non-vinyl women) tells you all you need to know about the general dumb-assedness of the current scene.

FLIP A COIN. Looks like someone hacked Andrew Sullivan's site and put up a thoroughly disoriented post in order to discredit him.

Or not. Who the hell can tell anymore?

Just remember: If you celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, it means you hate Britannia!

LIKE THE PUERTO RICANS SAID TO RADIO RAHEEM, You got it, bro. Billmon has de-necessitated my entry on the Reagan TV Movie mess.

HEARTS AND MINDS. Lock and load, maggots! General Ralph “Blood 'n' Guts” Peters admits in the New York Post that “while our occupation of Iraq is going vastly better than the media suggests, there is certainly room for improvement.” And for ol’ Blood ‘n’ Guts, improvement proceeds from the barrel of a gun.

Here’s how he proposes to deal with Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, some of whom are thought to be involved in the deadly events of last week:

If the populace continues to harbor our enemies and the enemies of a healthy Iraqi state, we need to impose strict martial law… we need to cut back on electricity, ration water, restrict access to the city and organize food distribution through a ration card system. And we need to occupy the city so thickly that the inhabitants can't step out of their front doors without bumping into an American soldier.

The General also proposes limiting Sunni access to the nation's vast oil profits, and Sunni representation in Iraqi security forces. Thus would every man, woman, and child among them feel the wrath of Peters!

Having laid out the short-term punishment detail, Blood 'n' Guts looks into the future, proposing "alternative plans for Iraq in case attempts to build an integrated democracy fail." Here one is tempted to ask, "Didn't you just say that the occupation is going vastly better than the media suggest?" but this would only lead to a knee in the gut and a court-martial for insubordination.

All Iraq, Peters prescribes, is to be divided into three parts, like Gaul. And the imperial resemblance will not end there. "We're overdue to take a lesson from the Romans and the British before us," barks the General, "and recognize the value of punitive expeditions… we need not feel obliged to rebuild every government we are forced to destroy… Where you cannot be loved, be feared…"

You might have gotten the impression, from all the statue-toppling and sob stories, that our bloody adventure in Iraq has been justified, absent the WMD, by the hope and democracy we are eventually going to bring to its citizens. Well, ol' Blood and Guts don't cotton to all that P.C. bullshit!

We at alicublog thank this belligerent clown for his candor. Now if only the draft-dodging mush-mouth in the White House had his guts. 'N' blood.

WOLF HUFFS, AND PUFFS, BUT APPARENTLY DOESN'T BLOW. Naomi Wolf has an offense against reason at New York. And OMG, it's about porn. Sample quote:

By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.

Naomi Wolf doesn't sound like a fun date.

Thank God Sisyphus Shrugged has this shit hilariously covered (Julia, please supply a link to "Joe's House O' Internet Cooz") or I'd have to go on one of my more offensive, spooge-soaked rampages here.

THAT WAS SO FUNNY I FORGOT TO LAUGH. David Frum reviews Al Franken for FrontPageMag. We all know what to expect, of course, though the Conscience of Canada does manage to surprise in one respect: rather than just slam the politics, he actually attempts to assess the humor quotient of the national best-seller. Less surprisingly, he finds it wanting, at least in comparison to the work of his favorite humorists.

And whom might they be? Mark Twain? George Ade? Dave Barry? "Not to be invidious," invidiates Frum, "but the best right-wing funny men -- P.J. O'Rourke, Rob Long, Mark Steyn -- truly are laugh-out-loud funny. I have been on airplanes on days when Steyn's column is running in the local paper and heard the laughs exploding from the seat in front of me like artillery shells out of a howitzer."

This last is an interesting metaphor; maybe Frum's fellow passengers were actually choking on airline peanuts. Or maybe they were reading the latest statement from the Fed. Or it could be that he was riding on Air Force One, and the President's men were trying, with as much lung power as they could muster, to plant a message on the credulous frostback.

Anyway, Frum deduces that, since purchasers of the book cannot possibly have bought it for its humor, they have shelled out chart-topping amounts for Lying Liars because they are looking for "villains and scapegoats." That's worth twenty bucks, isn't it, folks? He even compares these readers to supporters of Islamic terrorists ("How had the once-wealthy and all-conquering Muslim world been overtaken by the despised Christian West? Al Franken's Lies can be read as one Democrat's attempt to grapple with an analogous problem.")

Of course, I may have misread him -- maybe he thinks Franken's readers are Islamic terrorists:

...like the enraged Muslims... Franken repudiates both self-examination and self criticism. It is all somebody else's fault. The faithful have nothing to learn from anybody. The solution to their problems is not reform, and it is certainly not self-criticism. It is a return to the fundamentals of the faith -- and war against the unbelievers.

Whew. Heavy analysis for a joke book with cartoons.

I have to admit that I don't find most overtly political authors very funny. (Witty and eloquent in some cases, yes, but not hardly risible.) About the best of the right-wing lot is Florence King, but after that it's a dry gulch; even O'Rourke's post-Lampoon career baffles me. (The joke always seems to be about how drunk he can get and still file dispatches, and how bad hippies smell.) And, truth be told, Franken is only mildly amusing in his attack mode (though I liked the Jesus comic very much) -- he was much funnier with Tom Davis.

But that's the nexus of politics and humor for you. Hell, even Twain's political work is less funny than chilling. I modestly propose a theory: political humor is only really funny when your contempt for your adversaries so exceeds your desire to make a point that you leave the orbit of politics altogether, and achieve satire. See Waugh, Heller, and even Franken in the hilarious intro to Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (in which Jeanne Kirkpatrick finds herself obliged to review the book).

(I do laugh at Roger Ailes, BusyBusyBusy, and a number of others. But that's only because I hate America or something.)

WHEN PEOPLE SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT ME IT JUST REMINDS ME WHAT A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT I AM, AND I HAVE TO CUT MYSELF WITH THIS PENKNIFE WHILE LISTENING TO NINE INCH NAILS. But thank you anyway, Ted.

STYLE SHEET. Let me draw your attention to one of the commentators struggling over Jane Galt's now-thoroughly-discredited (by Wampum -- thanks, Atrios, for the tip) article, "Are the Democrats Effectively Discriminating Against Minorities?":

Let me add my impression (and this may just be the result of me sucumbing to lying GOP propoganda, but as a data point it *is* my impression), liberal activists do see to seem to be especially vehement and zealous in their denunciations of conservatives when they are also minorities. My impression is of a desperate desire to maintain a near monopoly of minority official among Democrats, and a visceral hatred of minority conservatives as being an affront to the universe. If this is not just Republican propoganda, then Democrats and liberals need to rethink how they present their arguments...

This follows a phenomenon I've observed before, Friendly Advice from Mortal Enemies: the Right suggesting to the Left ways in which the Left can more effectively get their message across to people.

Sometimes, as here, the idea is to displace responsibility for bad arguments onto one's opponent: I know I haven't proven it , now you disprove it! Nice try, buddy.

More often, though, the gambit is much simpler. The latest variation is to find, or pretend to be (hard to tell which in most cases), a disaffected Democrat, former or inexplicably current, who won't vote for Democrats, and who goes on to explain how the Democrats can become more Republican so he/she can vote for them.

Today Andrew Sullivan has another one of those gee-look-what-I-found letters in which he specializes, beginning thusly: "If any of the Democrats want to win, they will need to get my vote..." This person claims to have voted twice for Clinton and worked for Gore (!), yet now considers him/herself a "September 11 Republican" and believes her former party of "hates the South, the West, anything not New York (I'm from New York, so I can say that) or San Francisco, or anyone who feels proud flying the American flag."

That's quite a turnaround -- practically schizoid. Sullivan's got another one here -- from someone saying he/she is related to a Democrat who now cries (swear to God) "Thank God Gore lost!"

There are plenty of these floating around, but my favorite is this one from PhotoDude's comments. This correspondent seems more reliably genuine than Sullivan's, in the sense that he actually exists, I think, and has a name, Bruce Webster, and a web site (the ultimate proof of authenticity!). But his political gambit is similarly curious. He considers himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat," and it sounds like old Henry is the last Democrat he actually voted for: "I voted for Bush in 2000," he proudly avers. "I’ll vote for him again in 2004." Indeed, he only remains a Democrat "out of stubbornness."

So he seems lost to the fold -- yet he insists on lecturing the Dems as if they were the wayward children: "Sadly, I think it will take a crushing loss to lead the Democratic Party to remake itself, to realize that it has become the party of intolerance and exclusion and special interests, and that the Republican Party is becoming the party of inclusion and tolerance and leadership (sort of)."

This is a little like saying, "I came to believe that the Catholic Church is a tool of Satan, and since 1972 have attended only fundamentalist services. I regularly denounce the Church as the Whore of Babylon. Yet I still belong to Our Lady of Good Counsel parish. I'm just stubborn that way."

Come to think of it, maybe Sullivan wrote this one too.