SELF-PROMOTION. After a long hiatus I've put some new fiction up at my portfolio site. If you have any suggestions as to what magazines might be interested in this sort of stuff (the New Yorker has been strangely unresponsive) you might let me know.

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. The folks at Wampum have announced the 2003 Koufax Awards for lefty blogging. No doubt they would prefer that you read their whole announcement (and why shouldn't they? They worked ferociously hard and diligently on these Awards), but in the interests of exposing this worthy enterprise to a wider audience, here's a short summary:

Best Blog: Atrios.

Best Writing: Billmon.

Best Post: Billmon, "What a Tangled Web We Weave."

Best Series: David Neiwert for Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism."

Best Single Issue Blog: TalkLeft.

Best Group Blog: Daily Kos.

Most Humorous Blog: Tbogg.

Most Humorous Post: Atrios, "Preznit Giv Me Turkee."

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: South Knox Bubba.

Best New Blog: Kicking Ass and Whiskey Bar (billmon).

Best Expert Blog: Informed Consent.

Best Commentor: zizka.

Best Non-Liberal Blog (the "Drysdale"): Tacitus.

Best Design: Daily Kos.

Best Special Effects: Uggabugga.

As Koufax followers will know, alicublog was a finalist in every single category (with multiple citations in several, including Best Blog, in which voters could choose between alicublog with fart jokes and alicublog without fart jokes), and heavily favored by London bookmaker William Hill to sweep until my announcement on January 31 at the plaza of the Fox News Building (with amplifications at the Lakeside Lounge, the corner of East 7th Street and Avenue B, and the 9th Precinct Stationhouse) that I would decline all victories unless I were preemptively laurelled in the Special Effects category for my creative use of animated smiley faces and my blinking BUSH SUX banner. But I trust this will not taint the achievements of today's worthy victors.

JESUS HATES YOU. This morning's The Corner is the usual smorgasbord of psychopathology, with lots of expected outrage at civilly-disobedient gay marriages ("Can't someone do a citizen's arrest of these law-breaking registrars in San Francisco?" cries John Derbyshire, smartly clapping his hands in front of his chest as if to summon a constable chop-chop. "Where on earth are the state authorities? Where is the Governor?" Many thanks to the always hilarious Derb for starting my workday with an image of Rainier Wolfcastle striding through the Castro, torso oiled and an automatic weapon in each hand, marvelling, "I musd kill dem... und yet... dey all look chust like me!")

But the quote of the day is from Tim Graham, one of the many holy rollers who now help maintain The Corner's standards of excrescence:

And could we have an ABC special without absurd 'Jesus scholars' like John Dominic Crossan, touting their theories that Jesus was just a social revolutionary, a misunderstood hippie before it was popular?

It is so rare these days to hear a Fundamentalist even allude to the idea that the Carpenter was more like a hippie than he was like, say, Tim Graham.

And it sent me back to those dear, dead days of the early Seventies, when it seemed the Jesus freaks were all hippies, too -- the days of Jesus Christ, Superstar and Life magazine spreads of busty, braless hippie chicks gettin' full-immersion baptised (woo hoo) and "eleven long-haired Friends a' Jesus/In a chartreuse microbus."

Back then I was just getting debriefed from an extremely strict, commie-hatin', working-class Bridgeport Catholic grammar school. No one was teaching us St. Patrick's lads "liberation theology," I can tell you that much. Yet I instantly recognized the connection between the longhaired Jesus minstrels and the Jesus we had been taught about, because as hardcore as the nuns were, even they had to admit that Christ's new law was about love, distasteful as they found it, and forgiveness, impossible as they found that. The hippies were just wearing their gospels on their sleeves.

In later years I met a few certified Jesus Freaks and found them very pleasant company, if you stayed off the topic of religion (which, believe it or not, they could, though they ended each encounter by praying that one day I would "come to Jesus"). For years I thought followers of the Man from Galilee were perfectly OK.

Well, we all know what happened after that. American Christianity became a witch-huntin'. homo-hatin', muscle-flexin' affair. The nuns of St. Pat's, apparently, hadn't been hardcore enough; they'd been unable to make that final leap of faith, and present to us a different Jesus that did not love, that did not forgive. What was needed in this new, crucial age was not a Jesus who would lead us down to the riverside for veggie casseroles and wet t-shirt baptisms, but a Jesus that would lead us into battle, and that namby-pamby "Prince of Peace" character just wasn't going to make it.

Rev Falwell and the boys took care of business, and gave us the current, punitive, ass-kicking, tough-guy Jesus, covered with NASCAR decals and Republican endorsements, that Tim Graham and the rest of his buddies can worship. Judging by their behavior, this Jesus don't want no one-another-lovin' -- that's fag stuff! No, the new Jesus wants 'em to get up and spread venom (and sometimes amicus briefs) against those who have not gotten with the heavenly program.

People who talk about how the true meaning of Islam has been "hijacked" by belligerent radicals might want to turn their attention to the motes in their own eyes.

WHAT'S ON YOUR BLACKLIST? David Horowitz has created a searchable database of enemies of freedom (i.e., anyone to the left of David Horowitz). Referrers are numerous, but I saw it at Eschaton first.

And I'm not on it! My first reaction was, Christ on a crutch, what's a fella gotta do... (Though I'm not the only, nor the most qualified, party to feel this way.)

But I see that the Democratic Party fares only slightly better -- only its Colorado chapter has had its name named thus far. I'm guessing they got pride of place because they stand in the way of Horowitz' efforts to push an "Academic Bill of Rights" (involving government oversight of the content of college classes) through that state's legislature.

Part of the fun of the database is punching in random terms -- like "music," which yields an organization run by Zach de la Rocha's mom, and one "Association De Musicos Latinoamericanos" (I think they mean the Asociación de Músicos Latino Americanos, though what sinister purpose Horowitz sees in their activities I can't guess, unless he suspects them of trying to Mexiforniate Philadelphia).

"Blogs" yields zero hits. I guess we're all irrelevant, after all. Well, there's always the other lively arts. Bringing theatre to small-town America is always good for a spot on the watchlist. You might do a Living Newspaper or something.

You know, this kind of stuff is always funny at first...

UPDATE. The original site is down/password-protected/something, but Atrios came up with a mirror site.

HERE'S YOUR PITH HELMET, GENERAL. General Ralph "The World is a Stereotype" Peters talks today in the New York Post about the mysterious heathen Tartar Caucasian known to you civilians as the Russian Bear:

THE Russian soldier's greatest virtue has always been stubbornness. Time and again, Russia's military was defeated, fair and square -- by Charles XII's Swedes, Napoleon's polyglot legions and Hitler's armored barbarians. But the Russians wouldn't surrender...

Today, the Russians are being stubborn again, frustrating Europe's expectations and our own fond wishes. The new czar in the Kremlin is determined to have his country forge its own way. Our well-intentioned concerns don't move him a millimeter as he redesigns the one-party state for the 21st century.

Adding to our frustration, the people of Russia support him overwhelmingly.

They're being stubborn again.

Vladimir Putin's Russia presents those of us who revere democracy with a series of dilemmas. It's the worrisome member of the family of "Western" nations, charming one day, crazy the next -- and prone to nasty behavior... What do we make of a country that drinks itself to death, yet idolizes a national leader who refuses to raise a shot-glass to his lips?

And so on, in the manner of Commander McBragg talking about his battles with the fuzzie-wuzzies. These Caucasus Tartar Mongol hordes are shown as savages that easily submit to the yoke of Putinism, yet one is invited to admire, after a fashion, their bovine stubbornness.

The General has an easy answer for everything, and everywhere. Of course, the prescription varies from region to region. While in the Middle East, he advises that we show the damn wogs a bit of cold steel in the belly -- "Exemplary punishment may be out of fashion, but it's one of the most enduringly effective tools of statecraft. Where you cannot be loved, be feared" -- toward the Eurasian Cossack Tartar he advises a less forthright approach, though the regime is unspeakably corrupt and noxious to "those of us who revere democracy," and "Russia has done far more than its share to make terrorism worse."

"So how do we justify cooperating with Russia... Morally, we can't justify it. Yet, we cooperate. Because we must. In the real world, that's just how things work sometimes. You go with the less-bad alternative and grit your teeth."

Besides, says Peters, now looking a little less like the Scourge of the Satraps than previously, "An angel won't replace Putin in the Kremlin. But Putin isn't entirely a devil. The glass is dirty, but it's nearly three-quarters full."

Why does Peters take such a -- dare we say, moderate POV on the Russkies, but not on the Arabs? Could it be that the Russians would not be so easy to bomb into submission, or its eleven-time-zone mass so easy to occupy?

Or could some of it be that the General just has warmer feelings toward one set of stereotypes than for another?

THE TUNE ITSELF. The Mighty Mighty Reason Man, understandably unwilling to focus on politics every minute of the day, uncorks a long lament on the parlous state of popular music. Sample bit:

There is very little new music that doesn't sound like utter shit to me, and I actually caught myself referring to some Nu Metal song as "just noise" the other day. Just noise?!? Dear God, soon I'll be denouncing Elvis's lurid pelvic gyrations.

Understandable reaction. There is nothing new under the sun, the preacher sayeth, and when you reach a certain age new things aren't going to sound as good to you anymore.

So is there any objective basis for MMRM's verdict that "overall, the kids don't know what the hell they're doing these days"? Well, as I tell my Saturday reading comprehension class, if you can't prove a fact it's just an opinion, and there is no reliable metric for the suck/doesn't suck factor.

I would venture to say, though, that how we think about pop music has some influence on what we get, and so read with an interest an article in last week's Entertainment Weekly (Feb 13) about how the Beatles were now some kind of "alternative" band, respected and in some respects imitated by the smart, popular kids. Tom Sinclair quotes Mark Hoppus of blink-182: "Of course the Beatles are still relevant. They changed the landscape of music forever. They are geniuses and heroes and will always remain relevant."

The other opinion-leader quotes are as laudatory, but no less dull and unthoughtful, and focus either on the total like awesomeness of the band or on that highly prized quality, innovation: "...sitars, symphonies, feedback, echo, multitrack," says a music professor at Trinity College, "They were like Orville and Wilbur Wright, even though people are now flying fancier airplanes." Another guy says he likes "Tomorrow Never Knows" because "that's like, the first electronic song." Q-Tip says the Beatles' tendency to "lay the music down, manipulate it, fuck with it, try to push it... is the hip-hop aesthetic."

What's interesting is that no one in the whole story talks about the Beatles' ability to write excellent tunes, or indeed about any musical gifts that do not involve fucking with sounds once they're out, as oppose to creating them.

Sinclair obviously took this direction on purpose, but I think it was an easy sell to EW because that's all we think we want from music anymore.

This is the Age of the Phat Beat, and at musical equipment stores there's as much of a crowd around the digital gear and samples section as there is around the pine boxes that emit the original unprocessed sounds. Pro Tools has been the industry recording standard for about a decade, and DJ and producers are superstars. The country may be less enthusiastic than it once was about processed foods, but these are boom times for processed music.

And a lot of processed music is great. One might argue that the music mills of old (like the Brill Building and Motown's famed The Corporation) were the Industrial Age forebears of whatever fun-factories churn out the current wave of product. Only those guys were churning out tunes, see. The Beatles wouldn't have been able to push the white-lab-coated sound engineers out of the control room and fuck with their own shit if they hadn't demonstrated their ability to grab ears with their tunes. The ensuing technological playtime was an outgrowth of their musical genius, not a substitute for it.

It's great that we have all the bells and whistles we have now -- that's the product of the restless exploration of creative minds. And the best sonic experimenters from Negativland to Ween to Fatboy Slim make objets d'audio that are at least as impressive as anything the best song/guitar bands put out. But I think things have flipped over in the minds of the audience and even of a lot of the music makers: the raw material is less important than the shiny product that can made of it. If the Beatles were starting now, I suppose the Phat Beats would be engaged early on, and who knows what "A Hard Day's Night" would sound like if the Neptunes had first crack at it, rather than the rather professorial George Martin.

The paleness some of us perceive in contemporary pop has to do, I think, with the expectations bred by years of technical and -- maybe more so -- industry progress. Once the distance between your band playing a local sock-hop and the exalted status of Gerry and the Pacemakers was not so great. Now it's a world away. Why would you want to write something as modest as a great pop song when there's this ornate machine that makes you sound like money? Why wait for the symphony orchestra? There's a module for that at Sam Ash.

Once upon a time, if you wanted all that flash and syrup, you didn't go into rock and roll or r&b. You made Cliff Richard records.

After a while music blather is as tiresome as political blather, but I will add that I sometimes think the popularity of "divas" like Beyonce (however attractive the package) have to do with the sheer power of their vocal apparati, which push something like a human sound through all the 24K schmaltz. And that Outkast comes up with some great tunes.

ACT LIKE BLUTO, VOTE LIKE NIEDERMEYER. Jonah Goldberg is the son of longtime GOP dirty trickster Lucianne Goldberg, and an apple that appears not to have fallen from the tree at all. Note his own recent brown ops:

• Weeks ago, Crooked Timber suggested that the anonymous letters that increasingly comprise NRO's/The Corner's ammunition against Democrats were fake ("If you possess an email address and an eye-opening story, you've passed the rigorous fact-checking that has made National Review and the Penthouse Forum world-famous") and proposed that readers send fake anti-Democrat testimonials to The Corner to see if they would bite.
  
  
• At The Corner, Goldberg acknowledged CT's strategy and defended himself against the specific charge on which it was based ("...while the posts in the Corner may be anonymous, they are virtually never anonymous to me... some emails should certainly be taken with a grain of salt on the off-chance a correspondent is embellishing...").
  
  
• Popstar Moby suggests to the New York Daily News that concerned Bush opponents should spread false stories about the President's past.
  
  
• Seeing the main chance, Goldberg harshes on Moby and, without notice, changes his characterization of the CT attack:

  A couple of weeks ago, several liberal bloggers announced that they wanted their readers to deliberately make up fake emails and send them to NR because they found the real emails we were posting in the Corner too unhelpful to their cause. So far they've all been way too stupid to fool us, but that could change... it now seems safe to predict that the Moby-Moore fringe of liberalism is ratcheting-up it's ends justify-the-means approach to political discourse. Get ready for the Age of Mobyism, it won't be pretty.

In short, what Goldberg knew, and said he knew, was an attack on The Corner's credulity when it comes to anonymous anti-Democratic emails, he now conflates with Moby's active attempt to spread lies about the President. Even better, Goldberg uses this hastily-arranged moral high ground to denounce the Democrats' initiation of dirty tricks -- as if GOP Astroturf (or, for that matter, his Mom) had never existed.

This strategy is classical, and best known by Otter's use of it in Animal House: "Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!" No wonder Goldberg's always got that shit-eating sneer on his face: he's got what for modern conservatives must be the best of both worlds: he gets to live out his favorite movie every day -- in defense of the Dean Wormers of the world.

LET'S PLAY SPIN DOCTOR. In the course of one of her typically milky, unfocused novenas, the Crazy Jesus Lady challenges her presumably like-minded readers to take part, without pay, in a White House creative exploratory:

The Bush people have to roll it all into, say, one speech, which can be distilled to one paragraph, which people will distill to a sentence or two to explain to themselves and others why they support the president for re-election... What should the Bush paragraph consist of? How to make it new? How to make it memorable, and true? Readers, you are invited to wrap up in one paragraph what the Bush campaign should say as it unveils itself anew.

I would be much more eager to see the responses if I weren't aware that OpinionJournal very carefully screens them. So the cries of "Free Silver!" "Drive the Dusky Invader Southward!" and "Millions for Ethanol, Not One Cent for Deficit Reduction!" will probably not be seen by a wider audience.

CJL adds that "The White House reads this site. They'll see it." Alas, I cannot promise that sort of attention. But if you guys want to run your own paragraphs past the dozens of sleepless graduate students, weisenheimers, and ne'er-do-wells who comprise my audience, feel free to avail the comments feature to do so. I'll start the ball rolling with one of my own:

Funny how the Lord works: he allows the Antichrist to go to 'Nam and make himself a war hero, while his own true servant is forced by circumstance and a fear of examining rooms to spend his war years playing foosball and contributing to the invention of the beer bong. Now the evil one stands draped in glory, while I, like Job, seem destined for the dungheap. If you folks have read your Bible, though, you know which of us is truly God's favorite. P.S. Remember I'm the one that hates fags.

WE KNOW BECAUSE WE RAN THEM THROUGH THE NRO VERSIMILITRON.

KERRY'S WAR [John Derbyshire]
Two very authentic-sounding responses from vets to my previous blog on
Kerry's Vietnam war record. Both agree completely.


Posted at 01:54 PM

SHORTER CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. Must write about the evil Democrats, but Kerry's too hot to touch now. Dean's down. Might's well kick him. By the way, I do like principled anti-war candidates, especially if they can't win. Bartender! Some more napkins, please.

LIFE IMITATES VAUDEVILLE. Instapundit, who used to report on massive anti-war demonstrations by looking for the little clot of guys with GO BUSH signs and going "Heh, Indeed," shows a similar inattention to relevance in brandishing this Andrea Harris quote:

So, apparently we are now concluding that Hussein did not, in fact, have a huge stash of nuclear weapons aimed at New York and Washington DC. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It means that the thing the administration wanted to prevent was, in fact, prevented.

How's that old joke go?

"Hey, why'd you take my five dollars?"
"Coyote insurance."
"Coyote insurance? There's not a coyote for miles around here!"
"See how well it works?"

THE THOUSANDTH TIME AND COUNTING. Conservatives have torn into this post at The Note and are dragging the bloody bits across the internet:

Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are "conservative positions"...

The worldview of the dominant media can be seen in every frame of video and every print word choice that is currently being produced about the presidential race.

That means the President's communications advisers have a choice:

Try to change the storyline and the press' attitude, or try to win this election without changing them.

Sounds pretty hopeless for conservatives, doesn't it? Which explains the two terms apiece enjoyed by President Carter, President Mondale, President Dukakis, President Clinton, and President Gore. And the Democrats' current veto-proof majority in Congress.

Remember, just because it makes no sense doesn't mean it's true.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

RAINY DAY FUN. You can go to the Discotheque site and register to look at the party pictures. A lot of them look like this:



Then you can print them out, get a pen, and pretend you're an editor at Vice.

WHITE MAN'S BURDEN PART #3,420. I seldom follow those links at Instapundit that essentially say, "Here's a soldier that agrees with me, proof that the rest of you are sissies and traitors." Today, I broke form, goaded by IP's insistence that this message from an Army Public Affairs Officer "should be printed out and posted on the bulletin boards of newspapers everywhere."

Essentially, the anonymous soldier's pitch is that 1.) reporters are lazy and 2.) Iraqis are mentally retarded.

Now, I know from personal experience that the former is certainly true, though I would argue to the Army's PR agent that reporters dog it most when they know they're being fed bullshit and have no spade with which to dig -- which would seem to describe the lot of most "embeds" working under the Pentagon's current conditions. (The soldier also reveals that his comrades in arms don't like reporters, which will surprise no one who has survived the typical American playground).

The bit about the Iraqi people is kinda weird, though. Their long life under tyranny, the solder assures us, has caused them to "misinterpret things they see." For example, the local peasants "believed American food gave us X-Ray vision and that we had mechanical enhancements implanted in our bodies." While this seems credible (action-movie imagery interpreted by pre-industrial minds), our military Virgil takes things further with a little culturally-induced interpretation of his own: "Given that 80% of Iraqis are about as intellectually and emotionally developed as an American 6th grader," he says, "we must be very careful in trusting the average Iraqi's 'eye-witness testimony.'"

In other words, since the peasant is too simple to properly interpret Terminator movies, he is incapable of comprehending simple space-time dynamics (like who shot Achmed, and what uniform he was wearing). Of course it may be that the peasants are just plain lying -- our guide suggests that later, too, almost as an afterthought.

But the overall impression he seems to be trying to leave is that these people have no cognitive skills to speak off, and lazy reporters working for "news networks that are pushing a storyline" (unlike Army Public Affairs Officers, who are devoted to plain truth) are wrong to even consider the testimony of these subhumans.

Maybe those links weren't meant to be followed.

THE QUIET AMERICAN. I'm watching the tail end of the President on Russert now (Sunday sleep is, at this stage in my life, more important than political vigilance). I can easily see how people who don't support Bush would find him weak and unconvincing. I sure found him so. Russert's economic charts would have provoked a stronger defense, or objection, from a Republican Councilman than they got from the President of the United States.

But the show wasn't meant for me. The most remarkable thing about the event, as opposed to what actually happened during it, is that Bush was engaged in a display that was not totally managable by his office. This was a conscious decision by very smart operators, and my early, underinformed theory is that the President is lying doggo.

There is no way that he could have seemed powerful and confident in the situation: he seldom does when there's no backdrop covered with propaganda messages, no manicured text to work from. He didn't look so hot in the 2000 debates, either. But people liked him enough to vote for him anyway; in fact, he almost got a majority.

I hate to glom onto the conventional wisdom about Bush defying expectations, but it would make sense if the Bush boys were allowing a mild performance in February with a view toward a macho makeover in the Fall. You don't make red-meat speeches if you don't have to, because those things tend to wear out over time. Kerry has to make such speeches right now because he's running for something, and will be for months to come. Bush, I expect, will emerge from his New York Convention as from a chrysalis in the form of... well, I also expect they're still working on that, but I suspect it will involve our nation's military, the American Flag, Jesus Christ, and, of course, the photo opportunity down the street.

How that will work is anyone's guess, but it will be a lot more energetic and focused than what we saw today.

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.