THE RACE IS ON. It was Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, and... well, you see what happened.

It's my opinion that Dennis Kucinich with a brain aneurysm, and maybe even Joe Lieberman, would be a better President than Bush, so I have to say I'm happy with tonight's result because it makes the race interesting. I certainly wouldn't count Dean out on the basis of a few thousand votes in Iowa. But now, suddenly, an electorate that had been hearing about nothing but how "angry" Howard Dean is has been reminded that there are a bunch of other guys running, too.

And considering the mushiness of Bush's support, that's probably going to be a positive type of attention. I liked Kerry's line about having an economy that works for the people rather than a people that works for the economy -- and I like even more that millions of Americans are going to read it in their paper tomorrow.

Also, the GOP hit squads will have to change course for a while, and this will drain their meager intellectual resources; from what I've seen so far, their Kerry slurs really need work.

None of the Democrats running is a perfect contender, but by summer one of them will be contending. That's a little more real now, and (in this instance anyway) reality is more appealing than fantasy.

FADE FROM BLACK. National Review Online has posted no Martin Luther King observance today. This is a switch. In recent years, NRO writers have celebrated the great man's birth by explaining how he was really a conservative, or wishing aloud that they could still call people of King's race colored. Idiotic as these observances were, they still acknowledged the occasion.

But this year, nothing's doing, unless this thing by Jay Nordlinger is meant as a tribute:

DEPT. OF "I WISH I HAD SAID THAT": "George W. Bush has several black Americans in high-ranking positions, but often they're not considered black, because they are, of course, Republican. So here's my thought: Michael Jackson could have saved himself a fortune on cosmetic surgery just by becoming a Republican -- then, in the eyes of the world, he would have stopped being black."

But then, Nordlinger is capable of this kind of shit the rest of the year too. So it would seem that NRO is passing the holiday in silence.

One would like to think it is embarrassed silence, an acknowledgement that they have nothing worthwhile to say about the subject. I fear it is probably a different sort of resignation that has quieted them: with affirmative action dug in for a few more years at least, the President factoring no black votes into his electorial plans, and the most regular and readable black contributor to NRO a cursed pro-gay libertarian, the NROniks have probably just given up on black folk entirely.

OpinionJournal doesn't mention MLK Day either. Last year, a few days before King's birthday, they posted an article about Republicans and race -- basically praising Bush for speaking against Trent Lott, saying it gave him "racial capital that's much too precious to squander," and warning that "white Americans cannot continue to deliver nationwide elections to Republicans."

Maybe they've changed their minds, too.

UPDATE. Pandagon has some good Right-on-King notes, too.

UPDATE II. Here's something to contemplate on MLK Day. Did you know people made postcards of lynchings? I sure didn't, and I grew up in a culture of victimization that discouraged the pulling up of one's own bootstraps, gave Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize, and continues to stigmatize frat boys who think the term "colored people" is a real scream.

UPDATE III. At NRO's The Corner, Denmother Lopez finally drops some MLK love, sort of: a statement, posted without comment, from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Money quote: "Racial progress is a train that left the station decades ago..." Spin connoisseurs will note the cliche denoting finality ("left the station") used to describe "progress," which is by its nature ongoing. Think one can't have it both ways? One can with the right speechwriters.

THE WEDDING SINGER. You know, I really think they draw straws for gigs like this one: explaining the $1.5 billion for remedial marriage lessons our President has proposed. Rick Lowry got the short one this time, but he's a gamer and puts on a good show.

Welfare, as Lowry explains it, was "the greatest anti-child-poverty program in all of recorded history," but "During the past three decades, the consensus behind this wondrously effective social program has collapsed," leading to frogs, boils, locusts etc.

Previously, Lowry had spoken feelingly for the welfare reform enacted by Congress, calling it "the most spectacular public-policy success of the 1990s," and lobbying for its preservation because "a falling black-child poverty rate is worth preserving." But now he thinks that "without a renaissance in marriage there will be no true welfare reform."

One wonders why Republicans didn't call for marriage lessons back in 1996 instead of seemingly superfluous reform. Perhaps it was felt that single mothers had to be pushed off welfare rolls and into workplaces, and left for some years in that situation, before they would focus their minds on the advantages of marriage.

But they're still not going for it in numbers to suit Lowry. Can't see why not -- after all, says Lowry, "...fathers of children born out of wedlock make, on average, $17,000 a year," but "According to [the Heritage Foundation's Robert] Rector, if they were to marry the mothers of their children, 75 percent of the mothers would be lifted out of poverty. In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the mothers would be lifted out of poverty without even having to work themselves."

Despite this tremendous financial incentive, single mothers for some reason "consider [marriage] a near-utopian state," says Lowry, "to be achieved in some far-off future when they have made it into the middle class." And so they must be educated.

The President's plan appears to target couples, but as portrayed here it is really the ladies who need convincing. Perhaps a special class will be convened for single mothers. I would dearly love to see the reaction of women who daily juggle all the titanic responsibilities of working motherhood on subsistence wages to this sort of instruction. What would the instructor say when some of his subjects talk back, and tell him that they cannot afford sitters to mind their children while they use their few free hours to hunt down Mr. Right?

Lowry also works in a couple of slaps at " American social policy since the 1960s" and gay marriage. Maybe this is to show his colleagues that no matter how preposterous his assignment, he can still acquit himself with panache.

DAWN OF THE DEAD. For all their alleged contemporaneity and stoopid-freshness, right-wing bloggers still have an old-fashioned paleocon attitude toward the Liberal Media. All that distinguishes them from, say, William Safire in his Agnew speechwriting period, is style (or lack thereof), and perhaps class (ditto).

Take Professor Glenn Reynolds, for example and please. He continually hammers the point, with a series of "Oh, that liberal media" posts-'n'-quotes, that the NY Times, WashPost, and a host of other malefactors seek to manufacture consensus among those benighted folks who do not yet receive all their news and opinions from the internet. One common schtick: comparing the Times to Pravda, heh indeed.

But one should not infer from this that Reynolds cannot himself assemble a pack-not-a-herd when someone violates the standards of blogbrotherhood.

The other day one Dennis Perrin said something bad about James Lileks. Of course, some of us do that all the time, but Perrin registered his objections via a print publication.

This spurred from the Professor an extra-long post, summoning several of his independent-thinking friends to pile on Perrin.

Reynolds and his guests don't deal with Perrin's ideas much (unless you think calling his article "lame and confused" is a rigorous line of enquiry), preferring to insult Perrin himself. The consensus is that Perrin does not "get" the blogosphere.(One contributor even suggests, with apparent seriousness, that Perrin has been forced to work in print media because he can't make it as a blogger.)

The usually clear John Scalzi says that Perrin errs in attacking Lileks for expressing "his personal opinion on his personal Web site on his personal time." I just can't find anything like this idea in Perrin's article, and was mystified by Scalzi's assertion till I read this further down his column:

Perrin seems to want to shout that Emperor James has no clothes. Problem is, he's shouting this momentous discovery in the middle of a nudist colony. We're quite aware James has no clothes and is spouting off from the top of his head, thanks. As are we all. If you don't like it, you are of course perfectly free to go away and leave us nudists alone.

Once we get past the grisly image of Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, et alia, as nudists, it becomes clear that Perrin's offense was to judge Lileks' work by the standards of bad old Big Media -- clarity, reason, logical consistency, etc., as opposed to the "spouting" that distinguishes top blogs from underblogs in the Brave New World. Which is to say that nothing distinguishes them at all, except for preferential treatment by well-situated buddies.

"Looks like the Northern Alliance has been activated!" cries the Professor. Well, their thinking may not be clear, but it is certainly unidirectional. And with an army of zombies one can accomplish much.

MONEY QUOTE FROM CRAZY JESUS LADY'S LATEST BLATHER: "I am a conservative and do not hope for a Democratic victory, but I do hope for a Democratic fight..."

The rest of the blood issuing from Noonan's stigmata pools into this:

• The Democratic candidates who are likely to win are awful.
  
• All the people who will not win the nomination are nice.
  
• The awful boomer press is nicer now than when they supported that awful Clinton, they don't like that awful Dean.
  
• The nice Gephardt supporters have mud on their nice boots.
  
• Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.

It's enough to make one miss Father Coughlin.

CONQUEST. The ineffable John Derbyshire has an article up, positing Arabs as "The Irish of the World." As the Irish are to Britain, says he, so are the Arabs to everyone else. The staying power of the IRA and the intransigence of the fanatics who plot and move against America and its allies are objective correlatives.

Of course, there are a few bugs in the analogy, Derbyshire admits:

The West never ruled the Arabs in the way, or for the length of time, that Britain ruled Ireland. I cannot think of any Western leader who dealt with the Arabs as Oliver Cromwell dealt with the Irish. Nor did Ireland ever suffer the extreme misogynist neurosis that Lawrence Wright describes in Saudi Arabia [in his recent New Yorker essay]. Nor were her rulers and people ever corrupted by great wealth that required no effort on their part to generate it ? Ireland's economic problem was not wealth, but poverty.

So aside from the near-inversion of their economic and power relations, Anglo-Irish and World-Arabs is the same thing.

Oh, one other thing -- Derbyshire can see the rectification of the Anglo-Irish impasse: "...it will be the prosperity and sophistication of the modern Irish republic, her ancient and peculiar sense of nationhood dissolved by globalized economics, her religious intensity vitiated by the easy hedonism of Euro-culture, her aching sense of dwelling in the shadow of a richer, stronger power dispelled by the equalization of wealth and the shrinking of distances."

Small wonder he can see it: All this is not only possible but already visibly happening. Eire is free and engages profitably with the world and even with England; the Northern Ireland of today is nowhere near the battleground it was in, say, 1973. 350 years after Cromwell, a course correction is taking place.

The remedies that would redress the imbalance between each of the two pairs of worlds Derbyshire sees have been available in the European version for some time, and despite the many remaining impediments to success even Derbyshire, no Hibernophile, sees it going the right way.

As to the Arabs, well, we all see how that's been going. "...it is hard to see much sign of such improvements at present," Derbyshire says. "This is going to be a long, wearying fight."

What this implies, though Derbyshire doesn't speak of it, is that the stage of relations between us and not-us taking place in the Middle East is a lot further behind than the one between the Irish and the English.

To see how far back we are, entertain this message (per Gerard of Wales) from Roderic of Connaught (Rory O'Connor) to Dermot McMurrough of Leinster, whose dispute with Roderic over the High Kingship of Ireland led Dermot to invite, perhaps superfluously, the Norman invasion of Ireland:

Contrary to the conditions of our treaty of peace, you have invited a host of foreigners into this island, and yet, as long as you kept within the bounds of Leinster, we bore it patiently. But now, forasmuch as, regardless of your solemn oaths, and having no concern for the fate of the hostage you gave, you have broken the bounds agreed on, and insolently crossed the frontiers of your own territory; either restrain in future the irruptions of your foreign bands, or I will certainly have your son's head cut off, and send it to you.

This took place in the 12th Century. Today we have a corrupt and failing Saudi government desperately working its relations with the West while its brother nations come under the Coalition's wrecking balls, and mullahs and terrorists across the region brood and plot. Our killing of the Hussein boys is just a small foray into the Borgian blood-feast, the war on sons and brothers, there regnant.

Derbyshire's mention of the "easy hedonism of Euro-culture" sticks with me. American Conservatives still turn up their noses at this easy hedonism; Derbyshire himself was thrown into a snit over the recent micromarriage of Britney Spears. "...if a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it -- to tighten access, not loosen it," he cried. That his tut-tutting from the porch is merely a quaint appurtance of our go-go culture, rather than occasion for a warrant from the Witchfinder General, seems to show how far we've come.

Yet in some corner of our planet -- a planet seemingly vast right now, its nations unfathomably disparate, despite the impression given by our President's recent call to conquer the galaxy (as if the conquest of our own little piece of it were a settled issue) -- time has not moved so quickly.

We can only be said to deal with the Arabs as the English dealt with the Irish if the struggle of mankind out of ignorance and into the light is much more retarded than is generally supposed. This is the aspect of our current foreign relations that is most disturbing --- so disturbing that it upsets such a settled mind as Derbyshire's. It's as if the Rennaisance were only a favorably settled local by-election. Now we scour the East with blood and thunder, and our troops hand out democracy like a Chick tract, and we wait for the message to take hold.

I wouldn't advise we hold our breath.

SOMETIMES, BAD SEX REALLY IS WORSE THAN NO SEX:

Anna, a 22-year-old graduate student in Manhattan, said she remembers clearly how she was introduced to one of New York's sauciest underground social scenes. It was via an instant message from a stranger who had seen her personals ad online at Nerve.com... he wanted to know if Anna would be interested in going "with me and my hot tattooed girlfriend"...

To gain entry, Anna first had to send an erotic essay and a photo of herself... Anna made the cut, was given the party's location and a pass phrase -- "untie my corset" -- and on a chilly night last year donned fishnet stockings and high heels and headed out to her first sex party....

Porn fans might be drawn on, as the promise of hotness redeems even the worst prose. But since this story appears in the New York Times, the more judicious ones will be filled by a creeping dread that the promise will be hideously betrayed:

...a quarter of the women -- most in their 20's and early 30's -- were topless, save for dabs of body paint on their nipples, to comply with the city's public nudity laws. Downstairs in the midst of a crowd of around 200, half a dozen women were packed tightly together in a sort of group rub, undulating in time with the techno soundtrack. In a corner, a stunning young woman with blond hair preppily styled like Gwyneth Paltrow's...

Well, there goes my hard-on.

"It's not just, 'I'm going to go to this party with my boyfriend to have sex in front of other people,' " said Melinda Gallagher, 30, a former graduate student in human sexuality at New York University... "The philosophy is that women need their own space to explore sexuality. The women in the room direct whatever happens."

Well, there go my next three hard-ons.

Still, given some of the pathetic stories I've been hearing about sex-averse attitudes among our young folk, it is encouraging to hear that some kids, at least, are within hailing distance of getting laid.

The orgy does sound depressingly like a launch party for some energy drink, but that's probably the fault of the writer, who approaches his urban satyrs from the Marian-the-Librarian perspective used by Times lifestyle reporters since before "boo" became "grass." He even sinks so low as to solicit a dissent to the debauchery from "a clinical psychologist and sex therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center." The swingers, says the shrink, are "so overstimulated in this environment that they may not understand sexual intimacy in a more monogamous relationship." Well, who does?

So let us be optimistic. Maybe when the kids finally get fucking right, they can work on that shitty music they've been listening to.

MY BUDDY. "Republicans giving advice to Democrats these days are usually poorly-received."

Gee, why do you think that is?

"The persecution complex and bunker mentality of so many Dem activists is so acute that we're now witnessing instances in which Republican defenses of Howard Dean are being rejected as disingenuous."

We sent a thank-you card; didn't you get it?

"Which is fine, in a sense, in that it only marginalizes the other side and makes my 288-250 prediction look better all the time."

You want to beat us? I thought you were our friends.

"But it's not fine, in a larger sense, because it's bad for the country and civic discourse."

So we're not just hurting ourselves, we're hurting America. Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one!

Tacitus, your concern is touching, but let's just keep this relationship acrimonious, shall we?

DEAR MR. PREZNIT:

my boys scholteacher red me that you was goin to give muny to peple who is havin bad marreges. espeshly if they has low incum & are not faggits. me & lucinda who is a gurl is haven bad marrage problems du to her bein a bitch LOL. but seriusly folks. my mind is not rite sincd i got layed off from the walmart on accont of it closd & move to beaufort county. sumtimes i go off on her & the kids & 2 or 3 times they call the cops & lucinda say take the baby away sumplacd safe. i think me & lucinda need yr help bad & could you put us up for the interpernsinnal relashunship clas and maybe sum samwiches & a cuple beer if you cn do it LOL. it dont have to be $1.5 bilion i will take anything LOL. Good Luck to You Sir the peple are with you & gratful you doin so much to help marrege cause we hav not had much help with marrege since the preahcer went to prisin.

yurs truly
roy edroso
brooklyn, ny
ps if you hav turkee left over i wud like sum too

FINISH THE JOB. PBS has just run a long documentary on Reconstruction. In my little Catholic parochial school many years ago, we were taught that Reconstruction was at best well-meant but overzealous, and at worst a criminal reign of terror over Southern whites. In some quarters this version of history is still taught, so it is bracing to see the means of Reconstruction's reversal, including the murder of blacks and of elected officials of both races, described in a public forum.

An especially interesting segment treats the slaughter of much of the Twitchell family in Louisiana's Red River Parish by allies of the Marston family. The Twitchell patriarch, Marshall, had headed the Freedman's Bureau in Red River, and the Marstons would not countenance his carpetbagger authority.

Interviewed on the program is a descendent of these Marstons, a lean, well-spoken fellow who speaks of his forebears' actions with obvious pride.

It is useful to note that a number of people continue to take up the Lost Cause. You can read some of these regarding the PBS doc here. Sample quote: "PBS is totally under the control of the liberal, leftist elite. They consider anything to be 'social progress' as long as it's something that destroys the fabric of traditional society, especialy that of the Confederacy."

Not Reconstructed enough, if you ask me.

HEY MOMMA EARTH, BETTER BRING ME BACK DOWN, I'VE TAKEN JUST AS MUCH AS I CAN. "Military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan have made America safer, and tax cuts have made us all richer," says Brendan Miniter, "so Mr. Bush didn't have to promise the moon to win in November. But now that he has, it's up to the Democrats to prove they're not lost in space."

This is the sort of thing a right-wing hack might get away with were jobs were plentiful and peace at hand, but when the economy is stuck like an SUV in quicksand and the terror alerts keep a-comin' despite the allegedly epochal Saddam capture ("Terror alert level lowered but nation must stay vigilant, Ridge says"), it seems rather strange.

Small wonder: OpinionJournal's resident Western-Civ scold seeks to portray Bush's space jam as a "shrewd political move."

How so? Because this plan "has allowed the president to seize the mantle of John F. Kennedy by embracing a visionary project." (Amazingly, Miniter is not the only one to make this comparison: "Both [Kennedy and Bush] were elected in a year ending in '0,'" notes Rand Simberg with interest, and adds, "(while this one hasn't yet been borne out for Mr. Bush, it's looking increasing likely) both led a realignment that made their party the national majority for years to come," suggesting, among other things, that Simberg believes he can see into the future as long as he appeases the gods by briefly switching, within magic parentheses, into a whole new tense.)

Such a bold, not to mention (if polls are any indication) groundless, assertion needs proof points, even in so forgiving a venue as OpinionJournal, so Miniter offers a f'rinstance -- the Bush plan has "potentially tremendous benefits for senior citizens":

Humans can lose more than a quarter of their bone mass just by spending a few months in space. And they often do not fully recover once they're back on Earth. It's similar to, although much faster than, the bone loss old people experience. Solving this problem could advance the quality of life for millions of Americans.

We start with bold dreams and Camelot, and end up with a medical study of the sort that recruits participants on the back page of the Village Voice, only with cool rockets and gizmos and a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

They ain't making vision like they used to.

SHIT IN A CORNER, EPISODE #1,397. One of the fun things about internecine conservative struggles -- like the current one over immigration reform -- is the resulting pissing contest at The Corner over who represents the truest conservatism (or who is most nuts, depending on your perspective).

A strong entrant is Jonathan H. Adler:

WHERE ARE THE CONSERVATIVES? [Jonathan H. Adler]
There certainly are reasonable conservative arguments both for and against more a more restrictive immigration policy, but I'm simply shocked to read certain arguments in The Corner. Coming to America to take a job is tantamount to stealing? As if anyone is somehow entitled to a given job? I'd expect to read such an argument in The Nation, but not here.

Posted at 05:59 PM

Yes, Americans, if you manage to find a job, consider yourself privileged! This guy's so far out John Fucking Derbyshire has to straighten him out.

Another strong claim is made by Jonah Goldberg, who speaks approvingly of a plan by "My old boss Ben Wattenberg" to "help maintain the demographic balance of the United States -- i.e. prop-up the share of white folks in this country," an idea which, Goldberg helpfully notes, "wasn't racist in the slightest."

Catch this breath-taking, logic-defying show while you can. They'll probably all give it up by Friday and go back to talking about Wesley Clark's sweater.

AND THIRD, WHEN DID CRYSTAL METH COME BACK, AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME? John Derbyshire says that, contrary to the assertions of "homosexualist lobbies" that AIDS "just falls from the sky" (I must have missed that paper), the disease is actually spread by gay men fucked up on crank.

Heterosexuals fucked up on crank, of course, never hurt anyone.

That Derbyshire would vomit up such a thing is not, after all this time, surprising. But I have two questions:

First, why does Derb feign ignorance of crank ("something called 'crystal meth'") when he was clearly speeding his balls off when he wrote this?

Second, when is Tacitus going to do something about it?

BLANKET DAMNESTY. Tacitus catches Hesiod referring to Colin Powell's "Stepin Fetchit routine" and calls for leftists to "do something about it," adding generically, "I'm not hopeful, but in this case, being wrong would be great."

Okay. I disapprove of the remark. (Not much else I can do about it, since I am not Hesiod's mommy.)

And since we liberals are nothing but a herd, marching blindly in lockstep behind ANSWER banners, Tacitus may assume we have all disapproved.

He may also assume that we disapprove of any regrettable remarks by people with whom we generally agree which he, Professor Reynolds, and the rest of the "truth squads" may uncover.

Henceforth I will devote myself, as previously, to the lunatic sentiments with which a good number of conservatives around these parts tend to agree.

BIG MEDIA. Soon we mom and pop weblogs will be swept away by a wave of megablogs, which will offer first-rate opinions and commentary in bulk from centralized locations. Intelligent consumers will flock to them. No zoning board can defend us; our days are numbered.

Protoype models have done well, and now the not-so-thin end of the wedge is represented by The American Street: David Niewert, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Kevin Hayden, Jeralyn Merritt, Luis Toro, with who knows whom else waiting in the wings. How can alicublog compete? Maybe we'll go for retro chic, offering handmade, personalized satire, and thus find our niche. I'll discuss it with the Board as soon as they start returning my phone calls again.

Meantime we remain open here on our dusty byway. Your patronage is appreciated.

ON TO BOB JONES! Roger Simon is mad because there was a lot of anti-war talk at an MLA conference:

The University Class is one of the most rigid in America in its thinking... At a conference like the MLA, whose primary raison d'etre is job search, the pressure to conform is compounded. Attendees with pro-war views would naturally be reluctant to express themselves for fear of losing out in the marketplace. I know I'd keep my mouth shut in such an atmosphere. I already know not to broadcast my pro-war views when going to a meeting in Hollywood.

One of Simon's commenters is surprised to hear that Simon censors himself. Oh, says Simon, "I had my tongue pretty far in my cheek to make a point. I'm not the kind of personality who could hide his views even if I wanted to."

Not like the rest of you, he might have added. You're a-scared.

Sigh. You see this kind of thing all the time now. Seen from this POV, liberals are nervous nellies for objecting to the Patriot Act, but such conservative members of the Modern Language Association as may exist are justified in fearing for their very tenures.

"I certainly don't want to be whiny and self-pitying" says one such whiny, self-pitying fellow, but in his freshman year at the University of Michigan (1982!), "there was a whiff of violence in the air, on that campus of mine. There really was. Of course, you have to be careful whom you talk to this way, because you could be marked off as an exaggerator or paranoid or worse." No shit.

His remarks were delivered at the 20th Anniversary celebration of the conservative Harvard Salient. No doubt there were a number in attendance waving prostheses and crutches, legacies of campus battles endured in the second year of the first Reagan Adminstration. Or perhaps no one was there at all, their forces long since decimated by the implacable jackboots of the Left.

Despite the miraculous survival of the Salient and its friends, some folks like David Horowitz want a form of affirmative action to get right-wingers into college professorships. As soon as that one goes through, I want a job at Fox News.

One thing has always puzzled me about this. If liberals have a hammerlock on most faculties, and this is a terrible detriment to our nation (as conservatives from Revilo P. Oliver to Megan McArdle have long known), why not let the marketplace solve the problem?

Instead of sending fat checks or resumes to hotbeds of liberalism like Harvard and Berkeley, why not build new citadels of learning upon foundations already laid by sympathetic educators? Jerry Falwell's Liberty University comes to mind. Or Hillsdale, or Wheaton, or any of a number of Catholic colleges and universities that would happily turn the best and brightest conservative minds to a higher, nobler purpose.

What a great advance for the cause it would be if some parents would find the gumption to say, "I know you've been accepted to Yale, honey, but the American Renaissance demands that we send you to Bob Jones U." Or if Harvey Mansfield were to rise up and shout, "Farewell, Harvard commies, glory calls at Magdalen College!"

The gains, admittedly, would not be immediate. But isn't conservatism about taking the long view?

THE MISANTHROPOGYNIST. I have been reading with pleasure Mencken's "Defense of Women," which seems to have been written as a deliberate outrage and would, with greater contemporary circulation, probably still do the job today.

Like most things written about women by men, the book is mainly about men, but unlike most other authors so disposed, Mencken seems to be aware of it. His playful premise is that women are in every meaningful way superior to our gender, but have been obliged by our mulish resistance to the fact, and by social customs designed to enforce our groundless ascendancy (the word "levantine" occurs frequently), to exercise authority by subterfuge, primarily via marriage.

Already there's plenty to howl over, but Mencken goes on his merry way. The things at which most men excel, he asserts, are mere bagatelles:

A man thinks he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately...and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence... it takes no more sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

Imagine Kim du Toit or Glenn Reynolds getting a load of this! But no self-respecting feminist could go for it quite, either. For one thing, Mencken was implacably at odds with the suffragette (the book was first published in 1918), whom he described as "a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary nature." While he admits that women would soon enough "shake off their ancient disabilities" and emerge "as free competitors in a harsh world," yet "some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone."

Well, I don't know about that. But what I like about this, besides the great writing, is Mencken's detachment from the ordinary terms of debate. A good deal of reason and unreason was then (as now) being employed on the topic, and Mencken just staked out his own territory and had at it. He speaks approvingly of Havelock Ellis, but in general seems not to mind what anyone else has to say on the subject, prefering to make his own judgments based on what history and observation showed him. His instinct seems to be that his own reason was authority enough, and though most of us would disagree with a large part of it, in his case the analysis is at least coherent and compelling.

Mencken is shamelessly rhetorical and his style bears him along more reliably than his reason; he's frequently disingenuous and even self-contradictory, but in a way that would leave anyone trying to pin him looking pedantic. I think that's why so many intelligent people get a kick out of him, but also why anyone who identifies too closely with him inevitably looks foolish. Columns by the awful R. Emmett Tyrell, for example, used to run with a byline picture that aped a famous Mencken photo, and Tyrell's contraction-averse style still imitates the cadences of the Baltimore master, albeit stiffly. Even the initialized first name seems a forlorn sort of tribute, as it does, doubly, for P.J. O'Rourke, another professional contrarian whose obvious striving for the mantle of misanthropist-in-chief renders the homage somewhat pathetic.

All good writers make good examples, but as we were cautioned by the old Hai Karate ads, you have to be careful how you use them. It's never a good idea to try and be the "new" anything. (Look at Jet, a band that seems to want to be the new Black Crowes, an ambition that mystifies me.) From Mencken it might be best to take the lesson that it never hurts to take the lofty perspective once in a while, especially at a time when the political weblog scene more and more resembles a giant scrum trying, with grunts and curses, to push consensus one way or the other.

SHOT BY BOTH SIDES. Michael Totten is a pro-war type who till recently identified himself as a liberal. Some people think about him the way I think about "Democrat" Orson Scott Card -- as a living straw man who serves mainly as an "even the liberal" decoy to make real liberals look bad.

Who knows. David Horowitz and Roger L. Simon love the guy, and they're fairly satanic. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, essentially, liberals don't know anything about foreign policy. To the extent that he has a public profile, it seems based on his criticism of liberals.

But I forebear to judge. Totten, however, didn't, and recently declared himself an Independent, pushed, he said, by the "heretic-banishers" who are "purging non-conformists." Unsurprisingly, he mentions Orwell.

No sooner has Totten thrown off the yoke of orthodoxy when he notices the famous Club-for-Growth ad castigating "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading... Hollywood-loving, left-wing" fellow citizens. It offends him. "Over-the-top Bush-hatred is matched by over-the-top Dean-hatred," he declares. "...the right's new bigoted ad disgusts me."

But a lot of Totten's commentators -- legacy pledges, one imagines, from his even-the-liberal days -- don't understand why he's so upset. "Whoa!" writes one, "A lotta you girls need to take a deep breath. This is political theatre, not the Nuremberg laws." "To those on the left," declares another, "saying anything that is politically incorrect but is too close to the truth is over the top."

Now, I haven't dug too deep into Totten's oeuvre, and at first glance he seems like a smart enough guy. But I find it interesting and, to use a badly overworked modifier, ironic, that the minute he declares his independence, and steps out his front door to breathe the sweet air of freedom, he runs smack into the new neighbors, who think everyone who reads, eats, and drinks like him is a menace to their way of life.

Whether that's ironic-sigh or ironic-hardeharhar-serves-ya-right I'll leave to one side for right now, but I do think it's a good picture of the state of our discourse at present.

WE TRULY LIVE IN AN AGE OF WONDERS. Well, at least now I can stop worrying about the dangers of smoking.

UPDATE. Some people think farmed salmon is still safe. I'm ignoring them. I don't want it to be true! I want my friends to come find in me in some low seafood dive, and grab my arm, crying, "You're killin' yourself with that stuff!"

ROSE'S TURN. What a lot of bullshit has been written about Pete Rose lately. The relevant part of the Hall of Fame's mission statement says that it seeks to honor "those individuals who had exceptional careers." If Rose had used babies for batting practice, he would still meet this requirement.

George Will, naturally, talks the most outright nonsense about Rose, offering this deathless example of a hack who thinks he's found a "contrarian" angle:

His dwindling band of defenders responds that it is unfair to judge Rose not by what he does but by the way he does it. Yet regarding repentance, the way you do it is what you do.

The putative point of this streak of rhetorical puke is that Rose should behave more penitently -- perhaps, in Will's imaginings, by travelling barefoot to the grave of Bart Giamatti -- to preserve the fiction that baseball cares deeply about the conduct of its players.

This and other such moral posturings share the childish premise that current residents of the Hall, and the brotherhood of baseballers generally, would be sullied by Rose's company. What a laugh this would get from Ty Cobb and other immortals who were in life a good deal more rapacious and destructive than Rose. What a laugh it would draw from the many steroid abusers in MLB, if they had a sense of humor, or less pharmacetical damage to their facial muscles.

Well, baseball's fan base is aging, and filled at this stage with a bunch of maudlin, would-be Billy Crystals blubbering over The Mick and The Babe and The Catch as superstitious Irish grandmothers once blubbered over saints and sacred relics. Such like may value tent-meeting hysteria and bathos over clear-eyed justice, but that doesn't mean I have to.

I love baseball, and I insist it needs no romanticizing -- its traditions, its place in American history, and the achievements of its players are what they are, large in actual fact, not because publicists pumped them up; no Field of Dreams mists are needed to make them interesting and worthy of respect. The current ginned-up show of moral outrage is an embarrassment, and the Rose ban absurd.

UPDATE. A commentator to this post has kindly informed me of Rule 21, which mandates ineligibility for a player caught betting on his own club. Them's the rules, and since this is baseball we're talking about, not something trivial like politics, I have to agree Rose should stay out.

Also, while in the past I have simply taken down my posts when in the sober light of morning (or afternoon) they seemed less than convincing or coherent, I'm just leaving this one be, as a monument to my own incompetence.

I still don't like Will's more mystical assault on Rose, and in another context I might argue that the rule is bad and should be changed. But Rose accepted the terms by playing in the League and didn't abide by them, so that's that.