AND REPRESENTING THE QUEER-KILLIN' LEAGUE OF BUMFUCK, MISSISSIPPI, A NICE CANADIAN FELLA. David Frum marches to the head of the militia and breaks it down for the anti-gay-marriage shock troops:

The proponents of gay marriage accuse those us marital traditionalists of anger, hatred, obsession with homosexuality, etc. That's of course false... those of us on the traditionalist side welcomed the evolution toward greater understanding and sympathy for our fellow human creatures whose sexual constitution differs from the norm.

This will be news indeed to these guys and these guys and these guys, and the millions like them for whom Frum and his smiley, sophisticated buddies pretend to be leaders and spokesmodels.

This whole love-the-sinner-hate-the-Supreme-Court-of-Massachusetts schtick was old coming out of the gate. But it may help achieve what appears to be the real point of the exercise: to make the upcoming Federal Marriage Amendment drive look less like fag-bashing and more like freedom-fighting. To this end Frum imparts some ramparts etiquette:

...whether traditionalists win this battle will depend very largely on whether they can keep their temper. This debate will be won by whichever side does the better job of convincing the public that it stands up for the deepest values of American life -- and conservatives should remember at all times, as if they didn't know, that any incidents of extremism or harshness or vilification will instantly be publicized nationwide... So let's fight hard -- but let's be careful to fight smart.

I wonder how the civil rights movement of the 1960s might have fared if George Wallace, Bull Connor, et alia had thought to hire a slicker like this? Guess we're about to find out.

BUT THEN, WILLIAM SAFIRE HASN'T WEIGHED IN YET. We may not, alas, have heard the last word on Janet&Justin, but we well may have heard the craziest, via Carson Holloway:

For the stunt, as well as the whole song and indeed the entire halftime show, is perfectly emblematic of what such performers are selling: sex, understood exclusively as a source of bodily pleasure, and therefore devoid of any limiting responsibilities, like permanent commitment, or ennobling aspirations, like procreation. Stated more generally, they are selling an understanding of human life according to which happiness is achieved through the gratification of the most ordinary and powerful passions, and reason is impotent to identify any moral ends in the service of which our desires should be channeled. They are, moreover, selling this animalistic vision to the young and impressionable.

One need not be a Fundamentalist, or any kind of Christian, or even a believer in any revealed religion at all to regard all this as a disaster. One need only think, along with such non-religious philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, that reason should rule the passions, and that any decent society owes it to its young to foster, and not subvert, this ordering of the soul.

I hope the NFL hires Holloway to run next year's Superbowl entertainment, which will then consist of a dramatic recreation of Plato's Symposium, and the Pledge of Allegiance.

SPOOK TALK. Interesting "stiff defense" by CIA Director George Tenet. Too bad we can't get the phone logs from Kennebunkport a few days ago:

"It may be time for you to have a pointed conversation with that boy of yours."

"Now hold on there, amigo. You know the game as well as I do. A bishop can fall as easily as a pawn, but the Queen must be protected. Savvy?"

"This bishop has not fallen, and there are plenty of moves left in the game."

"I remind you, kemosabe, that you serve at the pleasure of the President. Maybe it's time somebody castled. A word to the Intelligence Committee and you boys might have a whole new game to play, one with a whole lot more wiggle-room, comprende?"

"Whatever the game, the signals must be protected from the opposition."

"Then you shouldn't have called me on the hall phone. Bar! Get those kids out of here, willya? Transmission compromised. Abort. Abort."

No one's losing their job over this one. Capisce?

AN ESPECIALLY BAD DAY. God knows, there's always a lot of stupid shit on the internet, but sometimes the computer screen seems like a window into an old-fashioned lunatic asylum.

Lileks unleashes wrath he previously reserved for Salam Pax and Michael Moore on Patrick Stewart. When in this sort of five-hours-without-a-cigar fury, Lileks doesn't argue, he chews pet peeves till his teeth squeak. For example: Stewart is in the theatre, that effete, hairspray-smelling makework program for enemies of American common sense ("Noted: the future of humanity shall consist not in getting this place right but watching angry Pinter screeds about that wretched meat we know as our own flawed species.."), whereas Lileks is "about seven Atkins-assisted days away from a six-pack" and wrestles alligators for a living, when not advising our Commander-in-Chief on matters foreign and domestic (Have the burger without the bun, Sir; you'll be energized and hostile all day long!) and pwaying games wif his widdle dawter.

Half the ravings lament that the man who played Picard on the TV does not share Lileks' world-views, and then the other half is devoted to detailing the unworthiness of this, this actor to advise the President on interplanetary foreign policy. Jesus Christ. Someone give him a breadstick.

Further down the sludgestream Clifford May does the "imminent" routine again. I thought we'd seen the last of this one -- noted that Bush didn't use the word "imminent" to describe Saddam's attack on the West, but he did use so many scare tactics, including imagery such as "one vial, one canister... could bring a day of horror like one we have never known," that he might as well have. But May has a new angle:

Here's one straightforward way to express it: When a knife is raised and pointed at you, and you block the thrust -- that's not pre-emption. That's self-defense, a common sense response to an imminent threat. By contrast, pre-emption is when you recognize that someone means you harm, glimpse a knife -- and take action before seeing the weapon poised for an imminent strike.

Someone should tell May that if one is a paranoid lunatic, such moments of recognition come rather easily, even if the knife is as imaginary as Saddam's WMDs. Frequently the paranoid will blame another party for his confusion: death row inmate Scott Panetti, for example, blames an alter-ego named Sarge, while Bush blames one named Faulty Intelligence.
Fascinating behaviors, all of which should be observed far, far away from the cutlery drawer.

Speaking of the clinically insane, Peggy Noonan blames 9/11 on the real Axis of Evil: Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Whitney Houston. Her friend Mickey Kaus declares we must not set a bad, breast-exposing example to "young, angry Muslims," who may decide to attack Rhythm Nation for its prurient dancing girls. In which case it will all be Janet Jackson's and Justin Timberlake's fault. Just as Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli caused the Holocaust.

I can tolerate the presence of such sad cases, but Lord it's awful when they start screaming.

THATCHER: "ENEMY ARMADA OFF JERSEY COAST"! YOU KNOW YOU HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST PROOF THAT THIS -- THIS ARMADA IS OFF THE JERSEY COAST! KANE: CAN YOU PROVE IT ISN'T? Ted Barlow has a nice idea: send fake personal reminiscences of Democratic candidates to The Corner, where they publish stuff like that by the bushel, and see if they bite.

The good thing about the idea is that it is designed to drive Frat-Boy in Chief Jonah Goldberg batty. Mission accomplished:

Several readers from Crooked Timber have sent me links to this bit from Snopes saying that the "Do you know who I am?" emails I posted about Kerry must not be true. With all do [sic] respect to Snopes, which I consider pretty authoritative, and a little less respect to the folks sending me the email, So what... the idea that self-important Senators, media bigwigs and the like don't ever say "Do you know who I am?" is batty. I've heard it said by self-annointed [sic] big shots numeroues [sic] times... there lots [sic] of real-world instances. And I still fully believe Kerry has provided more than a few of them.

In other words, it is believed by the subject's mortal enemies, therefore it is true, or at least worthy of publication.

The bad part of Ted's idea is throwing it back on Goldberg and his brethren. Instead of challenging The Corner's doubtlessly sterling editorial processes, why not avail one's own? I have done so before, publishing a stunning account of President Bush's ongoing drug abuse and inhuman cruelty, and by a happy coincidence I have just obtained the following missive, which fully meets Goldberg's standards as well as my own:

Your readers may be interested to know that, one night a few years ago, Jonah Goldberg challenged me to a fistfight in Milano's on Houston Street. I am able to identify him positively because earlier that evening he had distributed throughout the establishment printouts from some website with his byline and picture. His resemblance to Flounder from "Animal House" gave me pause, as did his costume, seemingly based on that of Angus Young of AC/DC, except that the schoolboy cap was emblazoned with the legend NIGGERS SUCK and the short pants fit his ample bottom rather badly. I attempted to reason with him, but he kept screaming in a high-pitched voice that he would do to me what Ronald Reagan did to Jimmy Carter, "only without the help of CIA operatives in Iran" (if my memory serves me aright, and taking into account the monstrous slurring of his words), and roaring the acronym, "DYKWIA," over and over again. Finally there was nothing for it but that I must push him out the front door and onto the sidewalk, where he fell upon his back and soiled himself copiously, crying for his mother.

I'm getting a steady trickle of emails like this, but the rest shall have to wait for the next news cycle.

WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? At The Corner, John Derbyshire gleefully repeats that his correspondents think Lyndon B. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall, among others, "should be dug up and posthumously hanged, as Oliver Cromwell was."

But never mind that -- Michael Moore was mean to Charlton Heston.

THE CONSPIRACY THEORY OF BAD HALF-TIME SHOWS. I see that many residents of The Corner have, like me, complained about the Super Bowl half-time show -- but while I disliked the thing because it was crass and ugly, they seem convinced that it is a plot by toe-tally eee-vil artists to corrupt their young ("'Dad, why are they doing that?' asked my son, age 6, just before his bedtime. What was I to say? 'Some people call it dancing,' was my lame reply..." God, I hope Lileks wasn't watching with Gnat, we'll never hear the end of it).

They even haul out the customary young-fogey comeback used whenever the bourgeoisie is epatered:

What appeals to them is the idea of shocking other people... what was cool about it was that it would offend the sensibilities of fuddy-duddies. This sort of thing is the source of a vast, vast amount of bad "art," music, fiction etc. The value of a song or a video is measured not by its creativity or excellence, but by its ability to elicit the desired response from the other side.

Always, someone -- probably wearing a beret and high on the latest drugs -- is trying to do something to them. As if pop culture were someone else's fault.

This conspiracy theory of bad half-time shows strikes me as a guilty evasion.

Right-wing types have done their utmost over the years to spread the idea that wealth generation is the highest and noblest purpose of man. This was bound to cause cultural fallout. The first Reaganite phase of this infantile idea's ascendancy brought us such atrocities as Dynasty and Trump Tower -- ugly, but in a way we all recognized: a rube's idea of "class."

In recent years, technological advances and corporate windfalls have given top-end providers of eye and ear candy the means to cram their products to an ungodly degree with such signifiers of wealth as elaborate special effects and the high sheen of digital recording. Audiences responded to this, because it sounded and looked, as the wonderfully apposite saying goes, like money.

Over time, content mattered less than these signifiers. Movies became inchoate light and sound shows, and videos became noisy showcases of art direction and bling. But that was okay -- audiences got what they wanted: a lavish sensory bath in something that quite obviously cost a fortune.

Even the sports world got in on this: star players became warrior gods, rope-muscled, chest-thumping embodiments of the will to power. (And every fan knew how many millions his hero was pulling down, and where his mansion and/or golf course was.) In an age where too much ain't enough and only the loudest, most violent, and the most x-treme gestures are worthy of notice, pro football reaped the greatest bounty. Once the NFL could only get Hank Williams Jr. to sing its praises; now everyone wants to rub up against the new national pastime.

As half-time can only last so long, lest the athletes' muscles turn to mahogany, a few years ago the show's producers come up with an idea: instead of having only one headliner, why not have several? This was brilliant, because no one really needs to watch or hear these artists do whole songs: that's what iPods and DVDs are for. Live performances are so low tech. But six or seven top acts crammed into a highly-concentrated ball of entertainment, glazed with smoke and lights and celebrated by squads of dancers -- now that looks like money!

And if the particular hallmark of this particular product (music, file under contemporary) is snake-hipped sexual play-acting, let's make sure we have plenty of that, too. Check the calendar to see if the time has come for a nansecond of exposed breast on network. It has? Then let's go for it.

In this case, the resulting soulless, joyless eye- and earsore chagrined conservatives because it showed a little tit. I, of course, like tit. However, I don't like the howling vacuousness of the thing, which seems to have bothered them not at all.

The economy, the Defense of Marriage Act, etc., are all important, but this is really why I'm not a conservative.

SELLOUT. The "money shot" box in the left margin is an invitation to advertise at alicublog via blogads. I have no idea how this will work. The one time I had a tip jar, I received exactly one donation (from a friend who could spare it less than I needed it) and a torrent of abuse from someone who worked in an advertising agency but thought it was disgraceful that I was asking for money. And it may alienate some of my readers, though if I were concerned about that I'd never write anything.

Still, if you have $10 or $20 to piss away, you might do worse than associate your cause with my ravings. I'm like Wesley Willis without the Casio, and cool to be associated with without actually being cool myself.

NOT A GOLDEN BOWL. I only grazed the big game tonight. Caught about half of it. It was well-played, except when it was sloppy; it was exciting, except when it was dull. None of the ads impressed me much (I missed the Simpsons one, though, which sounds like fun).

Maybe I'm just aging out of the blood-and-thunder demographic. I can't see why the boner pill ad chose to dis baseball, unless it's been proven that men with erectile dysfunction equate sex with bone-crushing NFL action, and baseball with limp dicks. And the halftime show was a more egregious monument to bad taste than last year's. What was up with Justin Timberlake ripping off Janet Jackson's pasty? Maybe that one went out to the boner pill demo.

I hope the ratings weren't so good that they start doing this kind of shit in the World Series.

BELLS AND WHISTLES. Over at OpinionJournal a Daniel Henninger column runs under the Jacobin headline "Patient Rage: Consumers march to the walls of the health-care castle." The input considered, however, is not from consumers, but from politicians, providers and their middlemen, the corporate human resources administrators who try to limit the effect of rising health-care costs to employees under their jurisidictions.

Henninger notes that most citizens get their health care coverage from the company store, so this area is where the "real action is," leaving concerns of the uninsured (14.6 percent of Americans, per the last census, and steadily rising) and Medicare recipients to one side. This ellision would seem to guarantee a less depressing picture of national health care right off the bat, but as it turns out, even these beneficiaries are not immune to rising costs, as any covered employee who saw his premiums and deductibles increase in the past year will suspect. Employers are trying all kinds of tricks to hide the damage -- for example, many of them are slashing benefits to retirees, which is a neat way to hide cost-cutting from those workers still at their desks -- but even Henninger cannot deny that companies "are taking employee premiums higher for more or less flat coverage."


And so a conference was convened by the World Health Congress; Henninger was its keynote moderator, and most of his article is based on testimony to that Congress.

The good news, such as it is, relies largely on the standbys of any modern and failing system promising that things will get better soon: technology ("brighter explosions are also in health's firmament... remote medical sensors, implanted monitors, Web-based health-care 'wizards'") and innovation. These benefits include "Web-based programs and human 'coaches' who give guidance on dealing with chronic aliments or complex medical problems," "a consumer-directed plan with a year-to-year financial rollover for its own workers, 'many of them single mothers,'" and "put[ting] a greater decision burden on workers."

All this makes Henninger optimistic. But haven't we attended this sort of presentation before? The Federal Government was going to be "reinvented," the internet was going to shift the very paradigm of business, and privatization was -- is! -- going to restore Social Security. Yet at the end of the day we get a lot of geegaws, new processes and metrics, and decreased services. The shrinking of the Federal deficit (remember that?) was largely paid for, and bought into, by reducing expectation of services from the Government. Given the way things are going, I doubt the reformation of health care will work any differently.

Time was when the powers that be distracted us punters with bread and circuses. Now we get bells and whistles. But if your kid needs her tonsils out, I don't see how they're going to make things any easy. Perhaps, given the glorious promise of "remote medical sensors" and such like, I'm being insufficiently forward-looking. But many of us can only look forward to the next (or present) medical exigency, and wonder how we're going to pay for it.

OSCAR ADVANCE POSTING. O helldamn, this has been a thick and thorny stint of posting lately, so let's talk Academy Awards. It's my plan to see a bunch more of the nominated achievements before February 29, but I will here give readings on those few I can intelligently judge:

Johnny Depp. After all his wonderful and sometimes strenuous prior performances, I think the voters finally named him because this one has a smidge extra of something he has always had (charm) and one thing he's never had (a Disney vehicle). His Jack Sparrow is, in long form, a somewhat sloppy performance -- its highs and lows come and go, and do not describe an arc; but then, neither does the film. Surely his languid incongruousness amid all those laudably stiff supporting performances helped him stand out. His long suit in this competition is his boldness of conception (think Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune) -- his short suit, one nice fat scene that would encompass all the Oscarworthy qualities.

Bill Murray. A New York Post gossip columnist caught Chevy Chase besmirching Murray's underplaying of this role. Truth be told, it's a fair cop, but in this relentless becalmed film, that may be why people applaud him so. In his Oscar-ignored Rushmore breakthrough, Murray was also in perfect low pitch with his cinematic surroundings -- recall him saying, to Max asking whether he was alright, "Mmmm... I get a little lonely sometimes." That Rushmore was brilliant, whereas Lost in Translation is only a nice college try by a Hollywood nepot, matters only in timing: Otherwise we'd be talking about Paul Giamatti right now. Lost is a modish and tidy packaging of middle-age and coming-of-age crises that also affords Murray a reward for his serious late work in films like Rushmore, Hamlet, and The Royal Tannenbaums. I do think Murray is a little stiff here at times (his smile at the end of his last encounter with the girl is thoroughly unearned and unconvincing), but there are many, many times when he is sweetly fluid, and these linger in the memory.

Diane Keaton. Holy shit she's good. The acting-ability gap between Annie Hall and Reds, her next nomination, is on balance small; the gap between Reds and now is huge. Even in the rather dicey, low-comedy early innings of Something's Gotta Give, she is believeable and grounded, on the limited basis the film then offers; but as the love affair takes off, she is b&g in everything. When I saw her part from the Nicholson character by kissing him wildly and declaring, "This... this is heartbreak!" I thought: This, this is Duse, this is Nazimova! For she is not only believeable and grounded, but magnificent and wild, justified and ancient, at every part of the spectrum. And she retains all the best qualities of her earlier career: the unpredictability, the sense of humor, and the tendency to suddenly shatter.

The three best picture nominees I have seen were already here briefly judged, but there will be more viewing and judging, I promise, in days to come.

CONTRA YGLESIAS. A day or so ago READINblogger Jeremy Osner invited me to visit a Matt Yglesias thread based on some David Bernstein twaddle I'd previously stripped. "I'll look at the Yglesias fracas later," I said at the time; "I don't like to drink before sundown."

(Pause. What an incestuous mass of linkage! Can I even go on? Yes.)

Well, I just looked at that comment thread, and the original post, and Holy Jesus, I'm so glad I'm drunk.

No Child Left Behind? This country has never had national educational standards, and Bush suddenly tied federal funding to adherence to "standards" to which not even the kinder of that edumacational paradise called Texas could adhere without massive relocation of the goalposts.

All it does is create a market for free-market educrats who will offer their services in pursuit of these unattainable goals for a fee. This is privatization by the back door; if Chris Whittle can't make free-market public education viable, the new idea, it would seem, is to open a new market for "standards" hucksters.

Oh, and it's good for something else: defunding even decent public school systems, as the Ohio example demonstrates. Perhaps these stolen dollars will fund the President's recent budgetary largesse elsewhere.

Matt, I'm sorry, this is bullshit of the highest order. That some of the big bucket called the "budget" gets poured into the little bucket that's called "education" doesn't make it a good thing. I tutor on weekends, and I have seen what gets basic knowledge into kids' heads: hard fucking work. And as much individual attention as good teachers can give each student. Not national syllabi devised by bureaucrats and related to underhanded cost-cutting schemes.

As a longtime Charles Goodell Republican, I beseech you, Matt, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

ALL THEY WILL CALL YOU WILL BE: EMPLOYEE. Three bits of posted matter together make an interesting point, though perhaps not one their individual authors intended.

At the American Enterprise Institute, Douglas A. Irwin declares "Outsourcing is Good for America."

Never mind that the tide of emigrating jobs is a large part of our current employment crisis, as the demand for labor does not necessarily involve American laborers, even in previously outsourcing-proof white-collar trades. Or that, in a telling bit of self-preservation, some Senators (including a few Republicans) are trying to head off the threat in their own little corner of the labor pool by placing a ban on offshore outsourcing of government jobs.

Irwin's executive summary tells us that this hemmorhage simply means "the world is changing." We shouldn't bother about why, or who has made it change. He admits that "the service sector, which traditionally has been insulated from international competition, is now ripe for outsourcing on a global scale," but asks us to take heart because this does not mean production is down. Your boss, or your former boss, is doing fine. Look at the manufacturing base, Irwin says; "manufacturing production has risen about 40 percent over the past decade... Of course, the share of the American workforce in manufacturing has fallen steadily over the postwar period because of vast increases in productivity, but this is a worldwide phenomenon."

In other words: it's the same shit all around, bro. Deal with it. Besides, costs will fall! "If a capable radiologist in India can read x-ray pictures at a quarter of the cost of doing so domestically," says Irwin, "important health care services can be delivered at lower cost to everyone, putting a brake on exploding medical costs."

Everyone who sees the cost of medical care going down anytime soon, raise your hands. No takers? Well, again, don't worry, because the New Way "includes such things as ensuring the portability of health and pension benefits in order to reduce the adverse impact of changing jobs, which must inevitably happen in an ever-changing economy." So when you're canned, your COBRA eligibility may be extended.

There's nothing here about getting the laid-off back to work. It's all about protecting companies from the crippling burden of outsourcing bans. Indeed, the worker doesn't enter into the equation; it's not for him or her that it was written. It's for those that run the decreasingly-employing firms, and their advocates on Wall Street, and in Washington.

Meanwhile over at the Seattle Times, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sums it up more succinctly:

The general principle of trade is, everyone benefits. Now, there are many circumstances where that general principle doesn't work, particularly when you don't have free and fair trade rules.

Countries are not being given the choice of rules. You say you have to open your markets. If you don't, here will be the consequences. The consequences are so dire they open their markets.

At that point, goods start flowing in. The guys who are buying the goods see (a benefit) from subsidized American corn or milk. But the people who lose their jobs are worse off.

If society as a whole isn't able to create new jobs, what you've done is move people from low-productivity jobs to unemployment. And that's not good for growth. That's not what's supposed to happen.

Over at OpinionJournal, where the free (as in "totally unencumbered by the concerns of puny humans") market rules, Tunku Varadarajan belittles a humble illustrator who has refused to ornament an article with which he does not agree. This sends a supposedly soul-searching Varadarajan ("worried that I had perhaps behaved like a Neanderthal" -- and could that be him? With his tailored cuffs and fat paycheck, yet could it?) to walk among the other artists-for-hire -- a little touch of Tunku in the night! -- to ask, was the man reasonable?

While one draughtsman says he "kinda admired the guy, in a funny kind of way, for his political purity," they all agree with their employer that the refusenik "went too far." One even shines Tunku's buttons (or assuages his own pride) more than this, explaining that "People sometimes ask me if I'm an 'artist.' I tell them I'm an 'illustrator.' The difference defines your prickly encounter with the person who makes his living as an illustrator but somehow thinks of himself as an artist."

Satisfied, Tunku concludes that the artist in question "must 'either be very young, or very rich.'" He doesn't explain the quote marks -- something a grandee told him at a gala once, perhaps? -- but adds that the third option may be that the artist is just "very silly."

"Silly" is an instructive choice of word here, implying that the loss of a paying gig for a freelance illustrator, whose income is probably not so much, is without consequence. And for Varadarajan, I'm sure that's so.

Still, one marvels that Varadarajan, formerly a lecturer in law at Oxford University and a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, took the time to glean quotes from the lowly scribblers of his Art Department at all. Perhaps he understands that the plebes will need a different sort of convincing than that offered by Irwin at the AEI. And that sort of convincing traditionally involves some overt humiliation, some ritual reminder -- not just of the recalictrant, but of those who had once labored with him -- that it is only a silly one, a self-styled "artist," a self-marginalizing outcast, who would refuse the king's (or even Tunku's) shilling. For they are not artists (or craftsmen, or union men, or International Workers of the World, or any such lofty sort), but merely employees, and even that slight status, in a world that is changing, may be taken away from them.

BUSH LIED. "I'M HEARTENED BY CONSERVATIVES... and how they are responding to the Bush NEA announcement. Jonah says that most of the e-mail he's getting-by something like a three-to-one margin-gives Bush a pass on this issue. This is a very important signal, because it shows a certain maturity of outlook on the part of conservatives: a dogged insistence on focusing on the Big Picture... Spending a few million bucks on the NEA is worth it if it reassures some people that Bush is not governing in a partisan spirit... But if Bush is willing to stand up to his own ideological supporters -- on what is relatively a trivial issue -- he can win points as a national uniter, the president of all the people. And that way he can get a resounding victory in November..." -- Mike Potemra, The Corner.

Remind yourself of this next time any of these guys talks about Democratic "flip-flops."

I KNOW HOW YA FEEL, ZIP. (January 15 comic -- if they're not showing it when you go, use the button to call it up.)

HE KNOWS WE ARE, BUT WHAT IS HE? David Bernstein at the Volokh site (I refuse to accept its chosen cognomen, "Conspiracy," as that usage reminds me of a bunch of corporate financial officers calling themselves a "crew") wonders, in light of the recent NEA funding, "why liberals are so hostile to George Bush":

Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals, judging by their ex ante policy preferences.

Haw haw. Stupid libruls! With their stupid Kennedys and their stupid edumacations and their stupid Satan!

One expects this sort of treatment from operatives like Bernstein, but few of them have the stones to follow it up immediately with something like this:

...cultural cues are more important than policy and ideology. W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise. But I find it amusing when they dress up their cultural prejudices in rhetoric...

To haul out the Mallard Fillmore caricatures and attack liberal "cultural prejudices" almost simultaneously takes a certain kind of... let's say, lack of self-consciousness.

As to his further claims that Bush isn't an ultraconservative 'cause he spends lots of money, I could tell Bernstein that real liberals prefer that public moneys be spent on enforcement of environmental regulations and Head Start, for example, than on grants to religious maniacs, but there wouldn't be much point, what with Bernstein standing there with his fingers in his ears, singing "La-la-la, I can't hear you."

PBS REPUBLICANS. At OpinionJournal, Naomi Schaeffer reports on the State Department's CultureConnect program, which sends "cultural ambassadors" like Frank McCourt and some Sinatra interpreter of whom Ms. Schaeffer seems enamored to places like Iraq (and Venezuela!) for the old hearts-and-minds gig. "'It gives us a vehicle for people of good will to connect,' says Patricia S. Harrison, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs," blah blah blahs Schaeffer.

Of course, the venue being what it is, Schaeffer must have thought her chances of publication would improve if she stuck this in:

But there is another sense in which it is important to send artists like [opera singer Denyce] Graves and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (another of the program's ambassadors) to Muslim countries. Though one hesitates to say there is anything reasonable in the impression that these young people have of America as the Great Satan, it is certainly true that the parts of American culture that get through to these countries are often crude, sexually explicit and lowbrow. Ms. Graves notes, "I see what's being imported in terms of American culture, and it's not a fair representation of who we are. I have cringed at what people think is American, but if you don't have a chance to visit, all you have is what's being said to you."

What she's talking about, of course, is the stuff most Americans really attend to: hip-hop, action movies, etc.

That's interesting. American pop culture is famously influential and profitable around the world. Foreigners willingly seek it out. Where they are prevented from experiencing it by mullahs, dictators, or poor TV transmission, they will even go underground to have it. Remember the black market rock concerts of the old Soviet Union?

These people aren't going to all that trouble for a PBS special. No, they want a big glassful of the same Moloko Plus we lucky Americans live on. Junk culture is what other people "think is American" because it is -- certainly more so than the grand opera Ms. Graves has been sent to "ambassador" to the underserved.

To get around this glaring anomaly, Schaeffer implies that the rowdy, bad stuff everyone listens to and watches is actually a elite invasion of culture, rather than the thing itself:

Indeed, one needn't go as far as Pakistan to find religious people who see American culture as a potentially destructive influence. Plenty of religious communities in the U.S. are disgusted with offensive rap lyrics or installation art like the elephant-dung painting of the Virgin Mary.

Yeah, that's what's sweeping the country, folks: Mobb Deep and Chris Ofili. Nice try, but it's what CultureConnect is selling that's the elitist alternative stuff, of the sort seen during Public Television fundraisers. Opera? Jazz? You see them selling out the Meadowlands? No, you see them in the boxed sets that come with the tote bag.

What makes this doubly weird is that, in and among the like-minded screeds against our goldurned culture that run tiresomely off the conservative conveyer belts, we have of late heard many gloats about "South Park Republicanism," an alleged conservative Great Awakening fueled by smutty, irreverant humor.

This may reflect a genuine divergence of opinion, but with this as with most discordant notes issuing from the Mighty Wurlitzer, I think it's more about having it both ways. For in the view of dedicated propagandists, what's the point of having a culture at all if you can't use it to stroke friends and flail enemies simultaneously?

GOING FOR THE GOLD. I'm a hopeless Oscar nerd. Even worse, I'm the kind of Oscar nerd who makes predictions -- really unsuccessful ones -- based mainly on historical precedents and voodoo. I've had to do it that way because, usually, I never see most of the movies up for awards.

But the latest nominations have come out and I find, to my shock, that I have already seen three of the five Best Picture Nominees, and three of the 10 nominated performances. I could conceivably catch a couple of films before February 29, and be able to discuss this superficial topic with some expertise. Then I shall be part of the great world!

For the record, Lost in Translation is Antonioni for Dummies, Master and Commander is beautiful but curiously inert, and Seabiscuit blows. More snap judgements to come!

A FIRST CLASS STRANGE-O. Once again, a mortal enemy of the Democratic Party (not to mention the democratic way of life) offers it collegial advice. She does so, predictably, by first asserting that her own Party is so interested in the health of the nation (which it has brought, unassisted, to near-ruin) that it must come pleading to the cursed Others that they not place a madman within polling distance of the Command in Chief:

Our No. 1 question used to be: Can we beat this guy easily? But now we feel the age of terrorism so profoundly challenges our country, and is so suggestive of future trauma and national pain, that our No. 1 question has become: Is he?.?.?. normal? Just normal. Is he stable and adult and experienced?

In this latest fever dream of the Wall Street Journal's resident mystic, Peggy "it was what it am and that's all that it am" Noonan, the specimen so lacking in normalcy, stability, adulthood and experience that it must not be exposed to the electoral light of day is... General Wesley Clark.

Her professed concern with America's well-being might be to the uninitated touching, but seasoned Noonan-watchers will know it for an affectation meant to bestow upon her own partisan scribblings an unearned loftiness.

She only recently visited similar slurs upon the erstwhile Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean ("Odd... immature... ungrounded..."); it's only a matter of time before she brings such like, with the same maudlin air of a duty painfully performed, against whatever other contestant seems to have a chance against her beloved Leader.

For now, Clark is her target, and she brings to his demolition all the sharp tools of her tenure as the Riefenstahl of Reaganism. "A first class strange-o," she proclaims Clark, "void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate's hunger."

On what grounds are these damning indictments delivered? These:

• Clark was dismissive of John Kerry before Noonan had her chance;
• Clark bragged of leading the U.N. mission against Kosovo (a defeat of totalitarianism in which Noonan's beloved Leader can claim no part);
• Clark changed his mind about the war (watch for this in her coming jihad against Kerry);
• Clark was mean to Brit Hume;
• Clark was nice to Michael Moore;
• Clark favors abortion rights (Jesus wept!);
• Camille Paglia doesn't like him.

Noonan spends many column inches on this last bit, which is hilarious, considering that Paglia has explained her "Italian pagan Catholicism" thusly: "I'm pro-prostitution -- I mean really pro, not just pro-prostitute and against prostitution. I'm pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality, pro-drag queens, pro-legalization of drugs" -- whereas Noonan's non-Italian, non-pagan Catholicism is explained mostly by her lies about Pope John Paul's endorsement of the new Mel Gibson movie.

It has been demonstrable for some time that this miserable harpy is nuts -- the question remains, why does a major outlet like the WSJ continue to avail her ravings? Perhaps the question answers itself.

SHORTER TACITUS. Goddamned Rockefeller Republican George W. Bush! I join the Coalition of the Wistful in pretending to consider other alternatives.

(I know Shorters are the job of BusyBusyBusy but, frankly, I'm too busybusybusy myself right now to do anything else...)