JIMBO'S PROGRESS. I've been too busy to post much. Also I figured, if you didn't want to buy my porn bumper sticker, the hell with you. But I'll be keeping an eye on Lileks for you. Days after he was fascinated by a man in a dress, he discovered, thanks to The New Criterion, that the "rot" of moral relativism goes back to Guy deMaupassant at least -- possibly further!

Maybe soon Lileks will put himself, Gnat, Jasper, and Whatshername on a raft and head down to the Mosquito Coast in search of moral certainties. That is, if he can take his iPod with him.

Well, Easter is the season of hope!

CONSERVATIVE POPULISM IN A NUTSHELL: Daniel Henninger tells us to go see The Passion, which he hasn't seen ("sounds a bit too much for me").

NEVER MIND ALL THAT -- HOWELL RAINES WAS A SOUTHERN LIBERAL! The New York Post outdoes itself today. No, not in that "Headless Body in Topless Bar" way -- the Murdoch rag hasn't shown that kind of brio in decades. I mean that its function as a Republican Party propaganda vehicle has seldom been so self-evident. It would seem the editors, finding the testimony of Condi Rice something of a wash (no bombshell revelations, no Joseph Welch moments), saw in the neutrality of the event a fine canvas upon which to paint a fantasy.

"THE LADY IS A CHAMP," cries the cover, "Tough Condi wins raves." The "raves" to which this refers might be the ones coming from the Post's own headline editors, who are egregiously eager to pump up our impression of the Security Advisor's performance. For example, while the news analysis of Deborah Orin is actually less doggedly spun than usual, it appears under the headline, "As 'great' as W knew she'd be," and the banner spread, "RICE THRIVES IN THE COOKER." We are also shown a large picture of Bob Kerrey appearing to reel from a head wound in a who's-hot-who's-not roundup called "Grading panel's partisan leanings."

The prize, however, goes to "SHE'S CAN-DO CONDI," the oddly titled report by Dan Kadison on the findings of five people hauled in off the street to give impressions of Rice's testimony. They are described as a "politically diverse" group of New Yorkers, comprising two Republicans, two Democrats, and two "Independents." (In New York City voter registration, by the way, Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one, and the last Republican Presidential candidate to carry the City was, I believe, Calvin Coolidge.) Highlights of the group's praise for Can-Do Condi: "She was blatantly evasive at times, but at other times just pretty honest." "I thought her opening statement was great, [as were] the questions and responses." "She was pretty much what I expected." Wow! When's the ticker-tape parade?

The Post is usually beneath notice, but it seemed instructive to note the howlingly obvious agenda of a large American newspaper that is not the New York Times. The Post has a greater circulation than the Chicago Sun-Times or the Miami Herald. It is, however, unable to survive on the quarters it collects from willing customers, and so must be sustained by funding from its publisher, the international villain Rupert Murdoch. This largesse permits the Post to daily pour its right-wing bilge into the same sluices served by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, et alia, and thence down into the American mainstream, which has grown so brackish and distasteful after years of such pollution that its friends scarcely recognize it, and only the most desperate or deluded try to refresh themselves by its waters.

Meanwhile some people are complaining that Bob Kerrey is on TV.

...BUT SOMEBODY'S GOTTA DO IT.The Ashcroft anti-porn push has attracted attention and even some Republicans have begun to complain. Of course, Ashcroft has his defenders, like this guy, who asks, " if the public really is as enamored of smut as Ashcroft's critics believe, why not campaign to change the law" enabling the most recent purge?

Let it never be said that I ran from a fight (except the physical kind, of course)! I know not what course others may take, but as for me:

NED FLANDERS DEFENDS HIS HOME AGAINST CHARGES OF BOLSHEVISM. Dissatisfied with his first strike, he adds that his architectural lifestyle choice is "masculine." Then he calls in a buddy (anonymous, of course -- this is National Review Online) for backup: "I have a hard time understanding how anyone with a decent education and knowledge of history, art and culture could consent -- much less eagerly elect -- to live in the suburbs, in houses as shoddily constructed and flawed as the logic of a whining liberal."

And they say conservatives don't got no culture!

EXIT STRATEGY. Richard Clarke tells Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker why he believes the Administration hasn't put enough troops into Afghanistan:

In retrospect, Clarke said, he believes that the President and his men did not respond for three reasons: "One, they did not want to get involved in Afghanistan like Russia did. Two, they were saving forces for the war in Iraq. And, three, Rumsfeld wanted to have a laboratory to prove his theory about the ability of small numbers of ground troops, coupled with airpower, to win decisive battles."

The wider effects of Rumsfield's plan are being felt in Iraq, but the Sec Def still plans no increase in U.S. troop strength there, either. Why should he? In a few months it won't be his problem anymore.

Rumsfeld today treated reporters to the NATO Secretary General, who made an interesting statement about the issue of a wider NATO role in Iraq -- especially after the planned June 30 handoff:

SEC.-GEN. DE HOOP SCHEFFER: As I said, 17 out of the 26 NATO nations have their forces on the ground and will have the transfer of sovereignty on the 30th of June, 1st of July. After that date, we'll have a sovereign Iraqi government. Then it is, of course, up to that Iraqi government, let's say, to decide what that government wants, because then we have a, clearly, cut-off between what is the situation now in the Iraq and what will be the situation after the 1st of July. And if that will come to a discussion in the NATO alliance, it is not easy to say, too hard to say at the moment, but I repeat, 17 out of 26 NATO nations are on the ground in Iraq, although it's not a NATO operation as such.

They're watching the clock. I expect the Iraqi Governing Council will certainly want, and need, all the heavily-armed help it can get at that point. President Mission Accomplished will hold onto that withdrawal date, and if the country is still a mess, well, it'll be a multinational mess, not ours (or his).

I think the political idea is to turn Iraq, in the popular imagination, into another Bosnia or Haiti -- an ongoing, far-away problem with which, thank God, we are only tangentially involved. We did the liberation -- let others do the mopping up.

(Oh, the Sec Gen also hopes for "a new [U.N.] Security Council resolution mandating specifically an international stabilization force in the longer term in Iraq. It will, of course, be... an important role, I hope, the crucial role." He's watching his ass, too.)

LIT CORNER. Been on a nice run with high art. Finally got around to reading Calderón's Life is a Dream. It plays hard on modern ears, with its long and literary declamations. Rosaura's famously interminable speech in Act III scene 4 goes on for four tightly-leaded pages in my little paperback, but when the writing is this beautiful -- "Violante broke open the prison of my woes; then in troops they surged out of my breast, tumbling over one another" -- who cares? Segismundo, a prince bound in chains from infancy, then restored to his birthright under the pretense that what he experiences is all a dream, is a proto-existential hero to rival Hamlet. That this profound play turns out a comedy seems very Spanish, as does the scene where the restored Segismundo, told he dare not throw his enemy off a parapet, does so with a childish sense of challenge. Even the clown dies nobly. They sure could write back in the 17th Century.

Speaking of Spaniards, I'm crawling through a history of the Jesuits by Jean Lacouture. Having been educated by Jebbies in the dim days of my youth (on scholarship -- marvel at it, ye sons of Reagan!), I am fascinated to learn that this most pedantic of orders was founded by a crazed mystic who, between his callings (he had many) to an educational mission, would do mitzvahs like wading into a freezing lake to shame a fornicator, crying, "I will stay here until I have assuaged the Wrath of God on your behalf!" Flipping around the story, I am less surprised to see that John Paul II is an implacable anti-Jesuit, who drove Father Drinan from Congress and, when Top Jeb and liberation theology sympathizer Pedro Arrupe was rendered incompetent by a stroke, refused to accept his resignation, the better to grind the order under his heel. Boo hiss. Things seem dire for the Jesuits now, but they've come back from worse (like the French Revolution), and I see great things for them in the eons to come.

Saw a few movies too. I was tickled to see Mighty Aphrodite, not least to observe how Woody Allen overtly pitch-modulates the old Greek goatsong into the voice of the turtle, as if to say, hey, numbskulls, you didn't notice? I've been doing this all along! He's not a failed borscht-belt comic, he's our Plautus. Stressing on his resistance to contemporary fads and lingo is a mug's game. They'll be laughing at his shit when kids stop wearing flaired trousers, again. And it was instructive to see Herzog's Woyzeck for the first time in years. The Büchner script is just a fragment, and Herzog, the perv, actually cuts dialogue. He stages it in what looks like an early 19th Century Austrian village, and makes you feel (as he does in Kaspar Hauser) as if the absurd, inhuman society his modern films describe were born there of scientific hubris and petty cruelty. In the leads, Klaus Kinski and Eva Mattes make the candles flare and blow out.

With treasures like these at my disposal, is it any wonder I haven't gotten to the movies lately?

GIVE 'EM A LITTLE CREDIT. Some people have asked me why I insist on characterizing my opponents as either duplicitious or insane. The answer is that I was well-brought-up. My friends will tell you that, when I have not had too much whiskey, I am a highly social creature who seeks to promote harmony and fellow-feeling in all encounters. To that end, when forced to discuss something, or someone, unpleasant, I put forth the most charitable interpretation possible. I will call a fat person "big-boned," for example, or a moron "refreshingly free of academic pretentions," etc. Call me polite to a fault, or politically correct, but there it is.

Consequently, when confronted with plain inanity from a person whose career depends upon an illusion of sagacity, I do my best to avoid questioning his intelligence, knowing such a charge would be a painful blow to his self-esteem. So I suggest that the person is deranged, which implies a medical condition over which he has no control, or a prevaricator, which is more than halfway a compliment in a culture such as ours that prizes success over honesty.

I must say, though, that Andrew Sullivan challenges my good manners. In his latest hand-wringing over gay marriage, he contemplates and even partially excerpts the late Sonny Bono's semi-coherent statement on the subject. Sample Bono quote:

So I think we go beyond the Constitution here. I think we go beyond these brilliant interpretations here, and I think we have hit feelings, and we've hit what people can handle and what they can't handle, and it's that simple...

It would be easy to dismiss the guy as an idiot, but Bono had achieved both pop celebrity and a House seat; he probably wasn't as dumb as her made himself out to be, and may have been a genius of sorts.

Bono's daughter, you see, was a lesbian, and this fact was known; but as a Republican Congressman Bono had to give props to the bigot wing of his party. So he did what any canny politican would do: he fudged, he personalized, he endeavored to turn attention toward the difficulty his choice forced upon himself -- and away from the difficulty his choice would cause millions of his fellow citizens. Sonny Bono was a clown, but he was no fool.

Sullivan, however, reads the situation differently: "I loved Bono's sentiments not because they were particularly coherent, but because they were so honest." Honest? Now look at what Sullivan says about other anti-gay-marriage Republicans with gay progeny:

I'm not privy to the strain the Cheney family must be under, nor would I want to be, but this is an issue that is hard to seal off from one's heart, because it is about the heart. And it's certainly sad that figures like Phyllis Shlafly should also have gay offspring…

Sad?Oh, let’s give these rich and powerful people more credit than that!

Sullivan seems to have missed that these people's prestige allows them to assume, quite reasonably, that they and their loved ones will be sealed from the consequences of their own political actions -- that no one will challenge Mary Cheney's money on the grounds that a lesbian handled it. Of course, they may be even more deep-thinking than that, and consider their kids a worthy sacrifice to the cause of their own power.

Is their case tragic? Potentially. But Cheney is no Creon -- he hasn't the moral stature of Creon. Actually, he hasn't the moral stature of a starving jackal. But he sure is smart.

As for Sullivan -- well, if one can't say anything nice…

MAKING AN EXAMPLE. The recent events in Fallujah were literally an outrage, and any human being who hasn't forgotten he is one has to be horrified at them. The representatives of our government are not exempt from this, but of course it was not a desire for vengeance that animated Paul Bremer's promise, echoed by Brigadier-General Kimmitt, to "pacify that city... at the time and place of our choosing." Put simply, on the terms of this occupation, it would of course be absolutely necessary to react in such a way as to pacify Fallujah.

What will that reaction be? The planned response is described in terms of justice, not vengeance. Kimmitt has promised to be "precise" in that response, as the Marines will "hunt down the people responsible for this bestial act." That job should be made easier by videotape of the atrocity's celebrants.

But what if, next time, the attackers not so foolhardy as to dance for the cameras?

Bush has re-emphasized that we are not going to withdraw any sooner from Iraq because of this. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage says, "There will be a price extracted. There will be a response and it will be obvious to all."

That "obvious to all" is important. As usual, Ralph "Blood and Guts" Peters is less circumspect than our leadership as to what is needed:

...our strong American values worked against us...

We didn't even have the common sense to declare martial law. It convinced our enemies that we were naive and weak.

When dealing with opponents whose power you have taken away, you start with an emphasis on the mailed fist, granting velvet-glove privileges as they're earned. Instead, we kidded ourselves that building playgrounds would persuade murderers to love us.

...when the cities of the Sunni Triangle, such as Fallujah, Ramadi or Tikrit, engaged in acts of terror, we needed to make an example of one of them to demonstrate our power and resolve to the others.

Again, on the terms of this occupation, this is absolutely correct. I've treated Peters as a buffoon in the pages before, but the hard fact is, despite his apparent instability, he continually spells out an outrageous fact which our government tries hard to leave unclear: that despite the attempted repackaging of our Iraq incursion as a social uplift program, we took over the country by force and have to hold it, for however long we are to hold it, by force as well.

(He also seems a buffoon because, had this fiasco taken place on the watch of, say, Bill Clinton, you know he'd be coming over the White House fence with a knife in his teeth.)

The clock is ticking off till June 30, when we hand control of this mess over to the Governing Council. I expect the Administration is anxious for this moment to arrive. Meanwhile (and, who knows? maybe for some time thereafter), the "Mission Accomplished" banner must remain furled, and the pacification of Fallujah is still on the agenda. If you believe that we are in Iraq by right, you might think of this as a police operation -- a crackdown meant to send a message to (or, to use Peters' language, "make an example" of) criminals in an unruly neighborhood. You might even accept a certain amount of collateral damage, as some people have been doing since the troops rolled in. But if you doubt the wisdom of this enterprise, it may seem like tragedy compounded by tragedy -- a mistake that no one has the will to stop making.

SHORTER CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The answer to your questions about Fallujah is "Saddam Hussein." In fact, that is the answer to all your questions. Glug, glug, glug.

RECOMMENDED. Can't imagine why I haven't done it before, but Norbizness now ascends to my Fellow Traveller list. Y'all must have something good to read when I finally cut my wrists.

NEXT UP: WHY ENGLISH BULLDOGS ARE MORE LOYAL THAN FRENCH BULLDOGS. I'm just about sure now that I shouldn't be reading NRO's The Corner, let alone fishing clots of unreason out of it for public delectation. And I am sworn to rid myself of this enervating and anti-social habit (a few more prayers to my Dark Lord Satan should do it!). But not just yet.

Lately the Corner kids have been playing with a piece of intellectual debris extrapolated, to use a polite word, from Jonah Goldberg's exchange with Kevin Drum as to liberal vs. conservative traditionalism. Goldberg wondered why liberals "ignore their own intellectual tradition" while conservatives cry out the names of Burke, Hayek etc. every few minutes, like Tourette's sufferers. Drum suggested that liberalism's forward-looking nature disinclined its followers to idol worship ("The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what [Chares] Beard would have thought?"). A flip answer, I thought, and a little shakey (try telling the ACLU that they're insufficiently respectful of the work of the Founders!), but no more so than the question deserved.

This inspired a strange sub-theme that lasted for days: in his gloss, outrider Julian Sanchez posited a "divide between theoretical and engineering dispositions," and suddenly everyone was debating whether engineering was liberal or conservative:

Can you imagine if the Boeing engineers designed the next generation of jetliners the way liberals would design our next health-care system? (A Goldberg reader)

Back when socialism was considered "scientific" lots of engineers and other scientists were not merely liberals, but Marxists. (Goldberg)

Jimmy Carter is an engineer. 'Nuff said. (Steve Hayward)

I am pretty sure that Thorstein Veblen was a leader in the Technocracy movement. (Goldberg)

Catherine and I must have met a couple of hundred [engineers] during our research for the Apollo book... I met precisely one who was a liberal. Maybe others were too, but among everyone who even mentioned politics, being conservative was taken for granted. I think there is a distinction between the engineer mindset, which is definitely, "There's a way to fix that," and the impulse to extend that mindset to human problems, which seems to be a proclivity of intellectuals. (Charles "Negroes are Stupid" Murray)

I am pro-engineer in theory... engineers are, as I see it, a Good Thing. (John Derbyshire)

The Conservative Books thing was lame, but this is fucking quadraplegic.

(You might argue that it's all just a joke. Okay. So how then is it different from the rest of the site?)

TIME FOR ANOTHER VACATION. "I think of welfare reform and gay marriage as very similar ideas: reversing some of the leftism of the past, encouraging family and responsibility, unifying rather than balkanizing society." -- Andrew "One More Garbled Apothegm, Then Off to P-town Again!" Sullivan (emphasis added).

As Jack Warden said to John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, I don't think his spinal cord touches his brain.

L'ART VIVANT. OpinionJournal does not restrict its screwy ideas to politics. In today's edition Tyler Green says the Whitney Museum should send its Biennial artists and their works on a tour of towns like Boise, Jackson, and Salt Lake City, because these benighted hamlets "need the Biennial to have the opportunity to see strong contemporary art." Green even suggests that the artists themselves could "spend several weeks in a city, available to a cross-section of the community."

I dearly love the idea of Julie Mehretu meeting her public in Oatmeal, Nebraska:

"Last year we had this air show and this F-16 blew up in midair and it kinda looked like your picture. Can I get that in a henna tattoo?"

Even better perhaps would be Emily Jacir, replicating her "Where We Come From" project, in which "she asked exiled Palestinians, 'If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?' Taking advantage of her American passport, she carried out their requests, which ranged from playing soccer with a boy in Haifa to visiting a mother's grave." It would take about seven minutes, I'll wager, for the Heartland boys to start sending her to McDonald's to get them lunch, or to the corner bar to ask for I. P. Freeley and Howard Djelaikakik.

It could all end happily enough, though. Assume Vivid Astro Focus may discover his talents are best suited to tricking out skateboards in Sandusky, Ohio. A win-win situation for art and America!

LET'S NOT GET CARRIED AWAY HERE.

RE: IRAQI FREE PRESS [KJL]
It should be noted that 250 newspapers have popped up in the last year in Iraq--and only one has been put in temporary shutdown mode.

Posted at 01:13 PM

Yeah, that was some consolation to John Peter Zenger, too.

THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE TELLS YOU HOW HUMORLESS LIBERALS ARE, please refer them to Lileks on Life of Brian, a movie which brings normal people joy but leaves the Prairie Pundit as unsettled as a 19th-century parson at Minsky's. Among his complaints: The movie includes an obvious parody of Meir Kahane and the JDL -- and (all together now, kulturkampfers) that's anti-Semitism! Even worse, the movie attacks every world-view except that dark stain on civilization, humanism! And that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" number -- it's so negative. Why couldn't the ending have been more -- Lutheran?

Verily, as our Lord himself said, do not criticize the mote in your neighbor's eye without regard for the stick up your own ass.

FOUR MORE YEARS! (ON YOUR PRISON SENTENCE). Are conservatives growing soft on crime? In addition to the aforementioned conservative complaints about the way cops are persecuting Rush Limbaugh, we now have NRO's Andrew Stuttaford defending some poor corporate accountant who got an extraordinarily harsh sentence for what are apparently crimes against money (the prosecution recommended stiff sentencing because the guy's fraud "eventually resulted in more than $500 million in Dynegy stock losses").

Granted, the perps in question are not the worthy targets of justice seen on Law & Order and NYPD Blue -- scruffy, ill-behaved, and frequently ethnic. But anything that causes right-wing factota to veer slightly from Nixon's Prime Directive (Law and Order is a winning issue never to be abandoned by the GOP) is remarkable.

This clemency fad at first appears to have reached its peak as the famously doctrinaire and unthoughtful Kathryn Lopez points to a story about new and outrageously lax warrantless search standards in New Orleans. If a cyborg like Lopez begins to worry about overreaching prosecutions, might a watershed have been reached?

Alas, K-Lo's self-correcting mechanism pulls her back from the precipice of blasphemy: "Has John Ashcroft been blamed yet?" she jokes.

We're sure Ashcroft had not direct role in the New Orleans case, as he is presently too busy for that -- to some extent with the 9/11 Commission, but mostly with the centerpiece of his own brand of judicial activism, mandatory sentencing. Ashcroft, it is well known, closely monitors sentencing by judges across America, searching for and correcting any deviation in the draconianism his office has perscribed. When his hounds notice such shortfalls, correction is swift, as Buffalo Senior District Judge John Elfvin discovered when the Feds ordered him to more stringently resentence a tax evader and a drug dealer he had let off, in their view, too lightly. Elfvin told the Buffalo News, "I thought [Federal sentencing] guidelines were guidelines, not mandates. Now I'm told they're mandates, and I have to proceed on that basis."

While I doubt the Attorney General directly called the Louisiana Fifth Circuit judges with suggestions, I can see how his administration's emphasis on harsher sentences and more of 'em would embolden judges (the right kinda judges, if ya know what I mean) in such a course, as it emboldens prosecutors to reach ever further, ever deeper in the quest for more prison years with which to notch their belts. In that kind of "justice" system, why wouldn't they conduct more searches, however specious, and seek decades-long sentences out of accounting-fraud cases? So what if some of the brethren momentarily object that what they do is cruel and unnecessary? They aren't the ones holding the gun and the gavel.

NOT THAT AGAIN. Oh, brother, Michael "Cracker" Graham is doing that "Liberals act all uptight while we Republicans loosen our ties and crank the Hootie tunes" number.

As one of the dubbed Japanese in "What's Up Tiger Lily?" muttered with exasperation when one of his colleagues hollered Banzai!: Could somebody tell him? You can start here.

A FAVOR TO A FRIEND. At OpinionJournal today, a chilling tale of the Orwellian persecution of a citizen accused of taking drugs: His lawyer tells how the brownshirts "raided drugstores near [his] home; seized his medical records without going through the required process... leaked false information... that he was about to plead guilty to a felony; threatened to make his medical records public unless he pled guilty to a felony he didn't commit... he, and I, worry about the precedent that's being set in this case. So should you."

I guess most of you have already figured out that the citizen suffering this Kafka nightmare is Rush Limbaugh. I mean, try to imagine any other celebrity drug user -- or, for that matter, drug decriminalization advocate -- getting this kind of sympathetic treatment at the nation's #1 right-wing rantskeller.

Just last June, OJ's Benjamin Ivory seemed close to retching as he noted that the French Ministry of Culture has honored "rocker Lou Reed, who wrote a hymn to 'Heroin.'" OJ was also hard on Reason editor Nick Gillespie for his alleged crimes against the drug war, calling his magazine "the High Times of the policy world," and accusing its staff of smoking marijuana at editorial meetings.

But let a friend of La Causa get caught in the noose, and on goes the libertarian mask. Brothers and sisters! When they came for Rush, I did nothing because I was not a millionaire blowhard...

Maybe next week, Rolling Stone will give a page or two to Courtney Love's lawyer... nah, they have some standards.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S INTELLECTUAL METHOD ON DISPLAY:

1. "This reader (a professor) wants to know how it would be a slap in the face to Americans to get rid of the under God portion since it was only added half a century ago. Well, because it obviously would be."

2. "Like saying violence never solves anything, people understand what I mean even when in reality what I'm saying isn't true."

His Town Hall bio says he's "Generation X’s answer to P.J. O’Rourke," but I'm thinking more Professor Irwin Corey without the self-awareness (and, it goes without saying, the intentional laughs).
.