SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. New Jersey is becoming a place where politicians don't buckle under pressure from their bishops, and scientists use cloning to cure cancer. Give me the more soulful Jersey of insane, violent mobsters.

SIMONIZING. Having told the world that any one of us would have tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib given the chance ("Who is that nitwit, most of us have been asking? Well, that nitwit is us"), Roger L. "I'm for gay rights" Simon opens the floor, and the usual grunting, roaring, and chest-beating ensues. Simon only deigns to interrupt when a poster named Tano points out, undeniably, that a lot of prominent conservatives have been quite okay with this inhuman behavior. This incenses his host, who chides:

...I don't respond to you for a simple reason. I have no interest in the terms liberal and conservative. They are junk terms to me, factually meaningless... Now some people call me a neocon, yet I vehemently favor gay marriage and stem cell research. It's all boring BS to me. I'm just interested in the facts of a situation. So the minutes a post begins with conservatives this or liberals that, I just skip it...

The perfidious labeller having been dismissed, a less chideworthy Simonite leaps into the fray:

I'm pretty tired of those Iraqis who only know how to whine, criticize, and complain, but never lift a finger to help. It's their future as well as ours that our troops are dying for. But whenever "their" people were maltreated or killed, they condemned the Americans, and rejoiced when the Americans were burnt and quartered. We grieve for our dead and wounded too, but we don't jump up and down when an Iraqi was killed... Don't Iraqis have responsibilities too?

An odd reaction, it would seem: chastising the Iraqis for getting all hot and bothered about an occupying army torturing their fellow citizens. But, brothers and sister, let us not paint this a "conservative" response, for in Simon's world, who's to say what's liberal and conservative? Or whether torture is anathema or just something we all might easily engage in, were we not busy with Hollywood screenplays? Let us cast aside meaningless labels, when all good men are agreed that Kerry was a pussy to serve in Vietnam and so must be kept from the Presidency.

I thought liberals were the ones that were all into moral relativism and shit. Ooops, but there I go again, using those tired old labels.

ALL IS WELL! INDEED! The torture thing really has Professor Reynolds working his Kevin-Bacon-in-Animal-House routine. Among his recent assertions indicating a paucity of locations toward which to run, and at which to hide:

• People who draw our attention to this scandal are just trying to defeat America. You should ignore them.
  
  
• We do stuff like this in our own prisons all the time -- though without the electrodes, dog attacks, simulated rape, etc. Or maybe we do have those things, too. But do I look like I care?
  
  
• One of my buddies says I'm really prolific and another says I need a vacation, so I'm going to watch a stupid movie with my wife, and I'll go on about the flags in it and my wife will go on about how Jessica Alba isn't asking anyone for a government handout, no sir, and suddenly this Abu Whatchamacallit thing that has been disturbing my sleepy afternoons in the faculty lounge seems very far away.

JESUS IS JUST ALRIGHT. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances, I viewed yesterday The Passion of the Christ. I've seen this thing alternately praised and damned as a phenomenon, but I have hardly seen it reviewed as a movie. That makes sense: the plot is a central narrative of a major religion, and the approach is personal rather than institutional -- more like Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew than King of Kings -- so it was bound to be controversial in terms that have little to do with aesthetics.

I'm not immune to this either. I could see that the craft aspects, including the acting, are all very fine, but outside of that I was aware throughout of the received experience that was coloring my reaction. If you were ever obliged to memorize the Stations of the Cross, as I was as a good Catholic boy, you're going to be pulled in by the story no matter what.

Gibson isn't just telling the story out of the book, though. He uses a couple of devices to interpret it for us. Some of these glosses I found lovely. After denying Jesus three times (and recalling, in flashback, Jesus' prediction of this), Peter has an episode of stunned shame that is very real and moving. And when Jesus has one of his falls on the way up the hill, Mary flashes back on Christ as a toddler, tumbling in the dust outside their home. It's as corny as Griffith and as effective.

There are also a lot of flashbacks that reflect Jesus' message of love and forgiveness, but these are overwhelmed by the behavior of the mob, the priests, and the Romans. Most of the action is about thoroughly unsympathetic people beating the living shit out of Jesus Christ. Popping in a little "love your enemies" here and there doesn't cut much ice when you're watching leering Centurions ripping the skin off the Son of God's back, or sneering priests mocking him as he agonizes on the Cross, all at length and in graphic detail.

In fact, the cumulative effect is that of a revenge fantasy: when Jesus dies and the earth cracks under the temple and the Romans all run away from the storm, there's only one moviegoer reaction that makes sense, and it isn't "Love Thy Neighbor" -- it's "Payback Time." (National Review's Michael Graham, attempting to refute charges of anti-Semitism against the film, wrote, "after the movie, I wanted to kick the crap out of a Roman." I wonder whether it occured to him how that might be taken in Rome.)

I suppose my opinion could be dismissed as that of a bleeding-heart crypto-Christian who is not down with the Church Militant mission of the filmmaker. You could dismiss all criticism in the same way, if the only point of works of art were to reenforce or refute prejudices, rather than to illuminate the human experience.

(ALMOST) NO COMMENT. From the brilliant Margaret at Matters of Little Significance:

Read about John Negroponte, the man who is supposed to be US Ambassador to Iraq.

He is accused of sponsoring terrorism for supporting the Contra insurgency against the left wing Sandinistas, the first ever democratically elected government of Nicaragua. He is also accused of inciting Contra attacks on civilians.

He was confirmed by the senate on May 6: 95-3 with 2 not voting.

Kerry was one of the 2 who did not vote.

My senators, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, both voted in favor.

It is incredible to me that with all that's going on, they still voted to make someone who is notorious for encouraging human rights abuses be ambassador to Iraq.

I hate to say so, but this episode has left me feeling a little Naderish.

OK, SO I’M A PHILISTINE. I finally got to the Whitney Biennial last night. This was my third or fourth WB, and by far the one with the most polymers. I was too stupified to take notes, but I did get a few laughs. One guy pasted matted fur to animal skulls, one of which was attached to a skeletal structure made of plaster and detritus; little wire birds pulled from its guts lengths of Italian Christmas lights, perhaps signifying entrails. In another installation, pixelated clouds moved slowly across a blue screen while futuristic music of the kind Chris Sarandon played for Margaux Hemingway in Lipstick blared from a stereo. This was called Super Mario Clouds.

But in the main it was awful: a collection of goofy items, like a stylized Roman Centurion’s helmet with a fried egg stuck on it; a full-sized, glass-panelled dumpster packed with industrial waste (a towering rebuke to the notion that a good idea will make a good work of art); little rooms filled with lights or plaster dust. The time and money that one imagines was spent on these hideosities were nearly as wearying as their spectrally thin aesthetic effects.

The painting and drawing (with the exception of some ringer Hockneys) was even worse. Most, like Julie Mehretu’s palimpsests, are at first glance interesting, until you realize that whatever deeper mysteries they might reveal upon contemplation are bland and mechanical. One might as well be solving rebus puzzles.

assume astro vivid focus did a big, nice-looking room pasted over with old advertising and hi-life images. In an exhibition filled with renderings that at their best rise to the exalted heights of commercial illustration and interior design, this is at least crafty, and gives some extra seconds of pleasure. But it struck me that a.a.v.f. was taking the imagery at face value – that the whole thing was just a force multiplier for the original effects wrought by admen and graphic designers.

Film and photography were better. Slater Bradley had a nice short with Stephen Hawking’s voice-box thing on the soundtrack, expostulating on the universe, while a home-movie camera scanned the faces in a children’s choir. This made a better effect than the other children’s choir thing, with a skeleton conducting. (This was one of the multi-screen pieces, the idea of which seems to be that it is bad to indoctrinate kids; another filled a room with cow’s udders.) Chloe Piene showed a girl in a tank-top and panties splattered in mud, roaring; when I realized another girl wasn’t going to come in and wrestle with her, I lost interest.

The saddest commentary came from a tour guide explicating some crappy painting to her charges. In a sidebar she mentioned the recent Giorgio Armani show at the Guggenheim, and said, "We’ll see more of this kind of collaboration of art and commerce in the years to come."

WHY DOES VICTOR DAVIS HANSON HATE AMERICA SO MUCH? In the course of minimizing the Iraqi POW thing, Victor Davis Hanson characterizes the Western peoples thusly:

We are "plagued with attention-deficit problems." We are "affluent, leisured and consensual," which means that we are pussies about what other people think of us ("not so much worried about being convicted of being illiberal as having the charge even raised in the first place").

When confronted with graphic war images, the "Western suburbanite" will "change channels and head to the patio, mumbling either, 'How can we fight such barbarians' or ? better yet ? 'Why would we wish to?'"

And when faced with the grotesque spectacle of American servicemen torturing prisoners, instead of shrugging it off, the West "engages not merely in much needed self-critique and scrutiny, but reaches a feeding frenzy that evolves to outright cultural cannibalism."

He also compares our "institutionalized cowardice" unfavorably to the way things are done in, say, Russia. "They really don't care much if you hate them," he swoons. "They are likely to do some pretty scary things if you press them." Nonetheless he does acknowledge that "you wouldn't really wish to emigrate there for a teaching fellowship," which I guess means that we can't expect Hanson to pull a Coriolanus and lead the admirably bloodthirsty Russkies against the weak-kneed West, though the thought seems to tempt him.

When all the Abu Ghraib stuff first came out, I figured on the "Of course this is terrible, but [insert rank neocon absurdity here]" responses, and even the "Of course this is terrible, but it's all the liberals' fault" angle. But this "It's not terrible at all, you Westerners are like-a de woman" thing is more what I'd expect from a secondary villain in an Indiana Jones movies than from a pundit. Is this how far we've sunk? Oh, much lower than this, for sure, but let's not tempt the blues on such a sunny day...

HEARTS AND MINDS, PART 56,957. Oh sweet Jesus. Daniel Henninger says we aren't doing enough propaganda in the Arab world -- and that's why the recent unpleasantness at Abu Ghraib is making us look bad. As ever, he traces the problem back to the perfidious Clintons.

Anybody remember Charlotte Beers? Early in the War on Whatchamacallit, the former Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather worldwide advertising agency was made an Undersecretary of State by the Bush Administration, and tasked and budgeted with the dissemination of pro-our side messages in Arabia. Beers left the government last year "for health reasons." A few months back she talked to advertising columnist Bob Garfield about her experiences, and here's some of the little that she said:

Nothing would be more dangerous than silence. It's like asking Tylenol to be very quiet when people found out there was poison inadvertently put into their Tylenol packages. They went immediately to the air and every phase of communication to talk about what they were going to do, how it would be handled, and they won a huge round with the consumer groups. We do have some policies that are not popular, and that doesn't mean necessarily that we can make those popular, but we can certainly engage on many other fronts...

The skill it takes to have a brand cross borders is to create a universal understanding, you know, maybe the love of a Coke and the party that goes with it, and so on. And the second thing was to always honor and respect the local customs. And so the lessons that we all had to learn as marketers, to earn the right to sell our brands in those countries is one the United States has to practice. I mean the first thing I did in the first year was bring in people from the private sector to conduct courses in that kind of communication which is about context, and also about the basics of branding, really.

All respect to Ms. Beers, a former client of mine, but does this sound like the kind of thinking that would make a dime's worth of difference in a region that regards us as an occupying force? Branding? A Tylenol scenario? Coca-Cola?

That kind of thing did work once, in the former Soviet Union. The aura of our plenty, our brands, our Levi's and Fords and Coca-Colas, had a powerful effect on people who felt themselves oppressed by their own government, not ours. But we're the Big Daddys now -- scrambling to convince a violently hostile region that our berserkers do not reflect our true intentions. Yet we have precious little Coke or unpoisoned Tylenol to offer as tokens of good faith.

No wonder Beers bailed. It's impossible to sell the sizzle without the steak.

RIFFMEISTERS. I was gonna make this a comment to Norbizness' excellent refutation of the lame Total Guitar Top Riffs list, but why not share with the rest of the class?

Nor is boss, but he takes a few missteps. I have to point out that "Hot Rats" is not a Mothers album, and the epochal "Willie the Pimp" is a Zappa/Beefheart/Jean-Luc Ponty riff, to be more accurate. (Speaking of fiddlers, how about "Diggy Diggy Lo" or "Jole Blon" or "Orange Blossom Special"?)

Whatever you think of the source material, you have to spot, as TG did, AC/DC and their patented off-tempo, pull-against-the-drummer riffing. But while "Back in Black" is alright, I think "Back in Business" is a superior example.

Also, if you put, as Nor does, one Neil Young riff up there, you have to put at least three. Young's secret weapon is the riff-embedded rhythm lick. If "Hey Hey, My My" rates, so must "Cinnamon Girl" and "I'm the Ocean," at least. (I'd drop "The Loner," too, but that's just me.)

Among the obscurities, let me insert "Tough Fucking Shit" by G.G. Allen and the Murder Junkies, "Ain't My Crime" by Motorhead, "Easter Woman" by the Residents, "Celebrated Summer" by Husker Du, and "Tractor Rape Chain" by Guided by Voices.

In the under-your-nose category, where the hell are "Cannonball," "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "Heart Full of Soul," "Victoria," "Satisfaction," et alia?

But folks, as the old Shake 'n' Bake commercial used to go, you can make it good's I can. Speak up!

MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE TICKETS. At National Review Online, Andrew Leigh exposes more liberal perfidy among our nation's intellectual snobs. There was apparently only a handful of right-wingers at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, proof of -- well, of under-representation of people who didn't want to be there, one imagines. Within mere grafs, Leigh has to admit, "Okay, maybe it isn't fair to judge a festival by who decides to rent the booths. After all, one presumes that if Regnery Books or NR deigned to rent a booth, they would have been permitted."

And yet he goes on writing.

He even interviews the festival's organizer, who shares with Leigh a long list of conservatives he invited, most of whom declined. Leigh is unfazed. He contacts Regnery. A "publicity representative, who did not want her name mentioned," says she doesn't remember the invitation. The plot thickens!

The piece ends, predictably enough, with a plea for diversity of the conservative kind. "Angelenos are being deprived of one side of a very important debate," Leigh bemoans.

I quite agree, and in the same spirit request that Leigh put me up for a spot on the NRO Post-Election Cruise. While it's true that I have not purchased a ticket, I think the burden rather lies on NRO to accomodate me, since it is they who have so far deprived their guests of "one side of a very important debate," which I am happy to supply for a small fee. Opportunities for intellectual diversity, after all, don't just march right up to you and plunk down $1,549 for admission -- you have to dig for them. I will consent to attend, therefore, if all my expenses are paid, if they can contrive to keep that hag Malkin away from me, and if I can make a naked human pyramid of John Derbyshire, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Stanley Kurtz. I'll be waiting to hear if their commitment to diversity is real.

SHORTER DIANA WEST. All you pro-abortion women stop having fun. Don't you know you're supposed to be humorless? Oh, darn -- now you're making me look humorless, you ghoulish c-words!

MY ENGLISH, SHE NOT SO GOOD. "The first thing is that the pictures [of tortured Iraqi prisoners] really prove that the US is superior to the Baathist dictatorship." -- Johan Norberg.

No worries, Johan -- they have trouble with English in Tennessee, too.

This whole "Yeah, well, the Arabs are worse" schtick may work this time. But what about next time?

NOTA BENE. To those of you who may have stumbled upon this regurgitation of some Terry Teachout pieces at OpinionJournal: please note that Teachout is not, in the main, the right-wing hatchet man that the OJ editors have therein portrayed by selective quotation. It's sad what you have to do to sell books, particularly to the True Believers. Teachout's blog About Last Night is still very much recommended; it does the art of criticism proud. He does let tip his ideological hand sometimes, but one of my other favorite critics, the lefty Michael Feingold, does so even more egregiously. And, unlike bluenosed asswipes like Roger Kimball, Teachout has well-developed aesthetics, rather than mere snobbery, on his side. Besides, anyone who sees Stanley Crouch for the fraud he is deserves our support.

SELF-AWARENESS DERBY. Jim Lileks sez:

...he didn’t strike me as a jolly old soul. But it has to be hard to be happy when one carries around so much bile and rage. It’s tiring. Anger wears you down, especially when your anger doesn’t seem to accomplish anything... You want to live like that? I don’t want to live like that. Because when you see red all the time you miss things...

Was Lileks, like old Scrooge, whisked to another dimension and forced to view his own life at a remove, which spectacle spurred this third-person repentance? No, he's talking about Ted Rall.

I realize it's just an angle -- Jimbo's harshed on Rall so often, even he must be tired of looking up synonyms for "traitor" -- but what do you make of a guy who thinks Democrats are potential terrorists, yet goes on for grafs and grafs about the overproductive bile ducts of others?

One is tempted to use the words "denial," or "projection," but you know what hearty laughter this kind of pop psychologizing draws from conservatives. So how about I just call him an asshole?

WHAT I DID ON MY COFFEE BREAK. I had a few minutes so I went to see if David Horowitz is still a horse's ass. You be the judge:

I guarantee you that conservatives who are in the forefront of the battle of ideas defending this country -- Victor Davis Hanson, David Frum, Robert Kagan to name three -- have never been commencement speakers, officially sponsored keynoters and honored guests of any liberal university. This tells you more than you probably care to know about the commitments of our university officials and the state of their campuses.

You know, that might make a good theme for the commencement addresses I've been asked to deliver at Bob Jones University! (Or perhaps I'll rest that week, and let Michael Moore fill in for me.)

Speaking of equine posteriors, John Podhoretz explains that we leftwards are actually happy Iraqi prisoners were tortured because that makes Iraq more like Vietnam in our warped minds. "They never knew happier days than when they were standing in opposition to their country," he declares. I wonder how he knows so much about us? Maybe he has attended some of our liberal parties, incognito in a wig of luxuriant dreadlocks.

Brothers and sisters, the secret is getting out -- soon the whole world will know that we hate this fucking country and want it overthrown by militant Islam, which totally rocks! There's only one way left to conceal the truth from ordinary Americans: start using bigger words.

THE WEATHER STARTED GETTING ROUGH, THE TINY SHIP WAS TOSSED. John O'Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, announces in OpinionJournal, "I was on Mr. Kerry's boat in Vietnam. He doesn't deserve to be commander in chief."

So of course I immediately read the thing, hoping for bombshell revelations, and was disappointed to view yet again that already-tired litany of Kerry cracks: Kerry was in a book with the American flag upside down on the cover, Kerry testified to military abuses which O'Neill did not witness, Kerry is an evil traitor whose "misrepresentations played a significant role in creating the negative and false image of Vietnam vets that has persisted for over three decades," etc.

And I thought, what a terrible, missed opportunity! Has O'Neill never read a tell-all biography, even in the supermarket check-out line? If he was on the boat with Kerry, why didn't he give us some juicy scenes of two swabbies named John, nose to nose in the hot Southeastern sun?

I mean, they don't even have to be verifiable: as the patented anonymous letter technology availed by many top bloggers has shown, when you're preaching to the choir, no one's going to check your Bible quotations. Besides, having commenced his public career as Nixon's anti-Kerry operative, I can't imagine O'Neill would mind getting his hands a little dirty.

Perhaps O'Neill's dialogue writing is even worse than his polemics, and he is embarrassed by it. Allow me, then, to offer some script doctoring:

Evening on the Mekong. The swift boat PCF-94 drifts silently. On the forward deck, EN3 Washington plays "Purple Haze" on his harmonica. Lt. O'Neill approaches Lt. Kerry on the main deck.

O'NEILL: Skip, what the blazes are we doing adrift at sundown? That jungle is overrun with murdering gooks who'll pick us off for sure!

KERRY: (lighting a joint) Mellow out, O'Neill. I'm just restoring the karmic balance a little. We shoot at them, they shoot at us. Who's to say what's right or wrong, n'cest pas?

O'NEILL: Permission to use my body as a human shield to defend the crew!

KERRY: Do your own thing, man.

O'NEILL races back and forth, the length of the boat, waving his arms.

O'NEILL: When I'm running this ship, things will be different!

KERRY: Damn straight -- I'll be eating foie gras with Bill Paley!

I got a million of 'em, hot cha cha cha cha! Just make the check out to "cash"; plausible deniability is everything in this business.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE PARTY ANIMAL. As I have observed before, the commentary pages these days are full of conservatives' reports on liberal parties that the authors frequently and (given how little they seem to enjoy them) inexplicably attend. Now, these are not just parties thrown by liberals, but parties at which attendees are apparently required to roar evidence of their affiliation every couple of minutes, as in this latest entry:

So we hold our glasses of mediocre Chardonnay, pick at little watercress, bread-enveloped triangles, while I long for herring filets and vodka. I mean, we're all Jewish, for God's sake!

Then our host chants the liberal mantra: "Bush has alienated us from the rest of the world. Europe hates us. The Muslims hate us. He's taking us into an abyss!"

The crowd raises their goblets, yelling "Kill Bush."

Help me out here, guys: Who throws these parties? At most of the parties I attend, guests drink not mediocre Chardonnay, but cheap beer, and talk about all sorts of stuff before politics. As these parties are in New York City, most of us don't like Bush, but the subject is little discussed, and I can't recall any occasion on which a host has asked us to raise our glasses in an oath of assassination (though my memory of some of these soirees is admittedly a bit hazy).

The author claims the social indoctrination sessions he describes (and was presumably forced to attend as some sort of community service) took place in Westport -- which he renders "Leftport," several times, which notion of humor may hint at the real reason for his social failures. But get this: he expects to solve that problem by moving from Leftport -- to New York City! Specifically the Meatpacking District. One imagines him, tie flipped over his shoulder, attempting to order a decent Chardonnay at Hogs & Heifers, or pushing Bush literature on the crowd at Florent.

Lotsa luck, buddy.

SEMPER FI. You can tell Tacitus is angry about our apparent pullback from Fallujah: he calls Bush a "good liberal." (Scroll down to "The End." I don't get this no-permalink thing, but it probably has to do with National Security.)

I understand T's fury at the situation, given that he has been supporting the occupation in good faith. Also, alas, I understand his use of "liberal" as a swear-word.

They're rather quiet about it at The Corner. Rich Lowry allows as how the pullback is a bad thing, but also avails an anonymous email that offers an "optimistic" reading of the event: it makes the June 30 handoff more viable. Later Jonah Goldberg waxes indignant that CBS "chose to soften and censor the images of the Fallujah massacre." The most serious complaints at NRO come from Mac Owens -- who, like Tacitus, has done his time in the Armed Services.

General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, of course, saw the writing on the wall early and was displeased by it. Some days later, as is his pattern, he did a long tribute to America's fighting men and women, asking his readers to call for more troops, even allowing generously that "it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or Republican."

Every community has its little constituencies, and former servicemembers constitute an interesting sub-section of the conservative choral society. They are utilized for much the same reason many liberal commentators haul out John Kerry's war record -- the use of actual combatants, active or not, adds ballast to war arguments. Naturally the servicemembers evince a compelling, personal, and sometimes prickly reaction to events in Iraq, but there are not enough of them in the commentariat to the override the "All is Well" message that Bush supporters endeavor to present to the world, even when they are of a mind to do so. Tactitus goes off the reservation sometimes, but he's not working for a major media outlet.

Despite their grumbling, I imagine the former combatants will continue to (to coin a phrase) soldier on in the great cause of defeating Democrats. That's their mission, and they aren't the sort to stand down when the going gets tough. For them, it appears, journalism is war by other means. And despite their occasional grumbles, it is something to observe their discipline under fire.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: After we kick their ass, American liberals will hook up with Al Qaeda. And it's all my fault because I wasn't right-wing in college, for which crime I now atone by cooking up this psychotic fantasy.

CF. LAST POST. In case you were wondering whether I meant that only Christians are addicted to self-referential insularity, here's Hugh Hewitt, fave of right-wing blowhards, suggesting that new LA Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley (!) hire or retain, in order, Roger L. Simon, Patt Morrison, Susan Estrich, Laura Ingrahm, Max Boot, Jim Lileks, and Mickey Kaus -- wingnuts all, except Morrison (whom Hewitt proposes to "keep LA's hard left happy") and the feeble Estrich.

"I haven't nominated any African-Americans or Latinos or Asian-Americans," says Hewitt, "but I know the folks Janet has pressed into service over the years just don't have the stuff to attract a crowd."

Then Hewitt says of Kinsley's new bailiwick, "It is so irrelevant that few even bother to complain anymore, or even to read it because it just doesn't matter."

See what I mean?