THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT. The CDC survey that purports to show our kids screw, smoke, and drink less than previously (but may be getting a little chunky) draws a straight-up libertarian response from the Reason Hit & Run crowd: "So now that the kids aren't fucking, smoking, and drinking as much, what's left to complain about? Well, they may be eating too much."

Meanwhile Ezra at Pandagon puckishly observers that the kids might not be getting laid because they're too fat.

Being an embittered old man, I take it to mean that kids today are abject pussies, and sit in front of video monitors all day, cramming Twinkies down their chutes, because they don't have the moxie we had when I was boy.

Soon, no doubt, Peggy Noonan will tell us that the manly example of George Bush has reformed the formerly degenerate youngsters. Claremont Institute hacks with a strong position in corrupt youth will demur, perhaps suggesting that the well-bred farm youth of the Red States skewed the survey (though I can't help but notice that the Texas kids were getting laid more than the New York kids; the longhorns also have the edge in suicide attempts; maybe I should move there). Maggie Gallagher will want to know why more children aren't getting married.

I only hope these kids aren't too dumb to lie to survey takers.

DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE REICH IS COOKING? Are the writers getting worse at National Review Online, or am I just developing a more sensitive nose for their bullshit? I hadn't noticed Colleen Carroll Campbell before today. She seems the tritest sort of Anti-Sex League harpy, here celebrating a book for its stop-the-presses message that real life isn't like Sex and the City. Among her tendentia:

Among many Chicagoans, the researchers found marriage on the decline, polygamy and domestic violence on the rise, and "transactional" sexual relationships -- meaning those forged purely for pleasure -- replacing "relational" ones.

People having sex for pleasure? It's worse than we thought!

Perhaps most striking to feminists may be the revelation that, rather than empowering women, the rejection of traditional sexual mores seems to have limited their choices of committed partners and even endangered their welfare... So it seems that the feminist ideal of postponing marriage as long as possible leaves women with fewer choices for desirable mates, or any mate at all.

It suddenly hit me that all those imbecilic sound-bites uttered in the earliest days of women's lib by pandering comedians and flailing politicians ("Those bra-burning kooks -- half of them couldn't land a man anyway") are still good as gold to today's wingnuts, particularly of the female anti-feminist variety. The only major change is the addition of a sense of victimization -- the claim that millions of innocent women were compelled to lives of misery by Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan. It is quite a spectacle when high priestesses of the Church of Personal Responsibility throw themselves in front of the altar and cry I couldn't help myself! The feminists forced me to taste my own menstrual blood, and after that I just couldn't get enough transactional sex!

Also, is "EuroPress Review" by Denis Boyles a regular feature? If so, is it always as crazy as today's? Boyles speaks of "the pornography [the Washington Post] takes such pride in publishing." I thought at first he was talking about a new Calvin Klein photo spread, then realized he meant the Abu Ghraib pictures:

Publishing yet more photos of S&M excess does nothing but titillate and excite the passions. Out there someplace are a group of sad souls aching for more such leaks, because hitherto forbidden pleasures they bring. We call those people "the editorial board of the Washington Post."

Of course, a lot of people have been trying to wish Abu Ghraib into the cornfield, but this combination of righteous indignation and clinical insanity is a lulu even by their standards.

Obviously the plum gigs at NRO are at The Corner: low word-counts, proofreading optional, and readers do your research for you. From the straining evident in Campbell's and Boyes' columns, it would seem low-grade writers audition for those sinecures by seeing if they can make a stink that can be smelt all the way from NRO's ill-read back pages.

SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON. Isn't it crazy how uncivil our discourse has become? By the way, my opponents are all idiots with a willful disregard for the obvious truth.

(The Shorter format was invented by... shit, I forget his name. Great American, anyway, and Busy Busy Busy currently handles the franchise.)

VIEW FROM THE RADICAL MUDDLE. The Crazy Jesus Lady reports (or completely makes up) an encounter with a possible swing voter. Like many in the throes of delirium, CJL's poetic sesibility is highly engaged: the swinger "lives in a $250,000 three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that never quite jelled aesthetically... and never quite jelled in human terms either, at least for her. She told me the neighbors seem nice but she doesn't really know them. Which is odd, as she's lived there 22 years... Years ago she still stopped by with a Pyrex dish of baked ziti when new people moved in, but not so much anymore."

Seeing no other point to this exposition, I can only assume CJL is presenting us here with a Dürer allegorical woodcut: where once pyrexed pasta and good fellowship reigned, now neighbors know not one another, as Satan prefers! The swinger lies on a fault-line between evil, rootless cosmopolitanism and sunny, hearty Americanism. CJL has described these two camps before, but with less metaphorical recourse, because her beloved Bush had just "won a war" and America was going the right way; but now even people she knows are tiring of the Leader, and it's time to stand out on streetcorners singing "Throw Out The Lifeline" and holding up lurid pictures of innocence bedazzled by the Dark Lord.

CJL warns us that she had taken no notes, that this is not, properly speaking, an interview, but no warning could prepare us adequately for the Molly Bloom of the Suburbs speechifying that follows:

But Clinton -- he was very smart and he had a great economy but he was a bum. Not just the sex but the money and the pardons and Hillary probably walked out of there with a couch on her head! Bush is a better person. He gets in and 9/11 comes and he handles it. He brought respect back. But he's always too eager to get involved in things. He pushes too much. He's pretty impetuous! It was good in Afghanistan, we got rid of those nuts. But Iraq -- I don't know. Iraq is very --w ho knows? Maybe it was too much. Maybe it was the right thing -- but now we've got this antiwar mess and it's 10 troops today and the Israelis and the Gaza strip and fighting and suicide and kids with backpacks and -- what a big mess.

Based on these ramblings, CJL offers the President advice, which is useless and need not concern us here, for, if there is any truth to the impression CJL has of her allegedly dear friend, then the candidates' logical response should be to visit the homes of such people and wave brightly-colored baubles, flash bright lights, march Barney out for a song, and otherwise employ tricks designed to win the childlike trust of the simple-minded.

But if (I say "if") voters are less moronic than this, Bush is fucked.

MEDIA CONSPIRACIES EXPOSED! In the manner of wolves instinctively amplifying one another's baleful howls, more wingnuts have joined Professor Reynolds in alerting America to the dangers of a free press. In the New York Post, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters lays full blame for our military's late, unprepossessing outcome in Fallujah on the goldurned media:

The media weren't reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.

Old Blood 'n' Guts' explanation of this very serious charge is weak from the outset. He refers glancingly to "Al-Jazeera and the BBC," then describes some typical incendiary Al-Jazeera coverage, but says nothing of the BBC version. Seasoned analysts of propaganda will recognize that Peters invoked the Beeb simply to get it associated in the minds of feeble-minded readers (clearly a majority, this being the Post) with the ravings of the rogue Middle Eastern network. (The General also alludes to Al-Jazeera as "the Arab CNN," probably hoping that his readers will remember only that CNN was, in some manner, involved in this treason).

The General goes on:

The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.

That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates a drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.

A nice head-pat for the U.S. media, BTW, but I'm sure the General knows, as does his omnivorous publisher, that these days all media is global, and the charges he hurls at Paris today will soon find their way home.

The main issue, though, is: the media "creates a drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president" how? The General does not describe the means, which I'm sure we'd all find most interesting. By what magical effect did Dan Rather freeze George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in their tracks? Did the sight of a wrecked convoy in the Hearld-Tribine actually cause the leaders and troops whom Peters has been journalistically tongue-bathing since the war began to suddenly shudder and throw down their arms?

Perhaps the General actually means that the perfidious networks physically used radio waves, in the manner of mad scientists in old horror movies, to disorient our troops. Imagine our fighting men clutching their helmets as curved lines of force radiate across the screen: "Foreign policy feeling... weak..." gasps the GI. "Feel... sudden compulsion to... negotiate a settlement..." While off behind a nearby sandhill, Bin Laden and Ted Turner cackle fiendishly and rub their hands.

I marvel that Peters, an ardent militarist who describes our soldiers in almost godlike terms, and our leaders, reflexively, as neo-Churchills, believes they can be hobbled, much less defeated, by the pictures on the TV.

AROUND THE WEB.The Poor Man's recent design innovations are nice, but his FAQs for them are even better. Revel in them.

Also interested to see that Rick Brookhiser is still providing adult supervision at The Corner -- in this case, wearily reminding his intellectually pre-teen charges that there is a difference between F. Scott Fitzgerald and a John Held drawing. That he didn't also wade into the Derbyshire/Orwell thing shows that, despite his enthusiasm for the Iraq war, Brookhiser can identify some lost causes, at least.

SIMPLE, SIMON. Roger L. Simon asks:

Why didn't George Bush enlist Stephen Spielberg to help with Iraq? Because he's a Democrat?

No, because he's a fucking movie director. And the mess in Iraq isn't something you can fix with CGI.

INTERNET PORN. Michael Totten, everyone's favorite "liberal" Bush supporter, provides a link to a video of Nick Berg's head being chopped off. Well, I've seen bukkake and erotic vomit (whatever that's called) -- and yuk, but so what? Oh, but Totten's making a point -- our atrocities are not as bad as their atrocities! Keep that bar raised high, Mike!

This kind of shit reminds me of my dear old Mom responding to The Passion of the Christ: "See how much he took," she kept muttering. Mom, bless her, was reacting perfectly to what Mel Gibson was selling: look whatta mess they made of my boy! Which is exactly what Totten and his fellow travellers are up to: turning this alleged struggle for democracy into a blood feud. Those bastards done worse and (no matter what his pussy dad said) we gotta do worse to them!

I'm increasingly amazed by the faith of right-wing nuts in bloodkkake as a means of convincing the electorate.

HM. How best to respond to Professor Reynolds' latest rhetorical question?

Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn't exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority -- or even a large and angry minority -- of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

1.) You tell me.

2.) Shouldn't you edit this question for clarity, e.g.: "How long will a large and active minority allow freedom of the press to exist?" But, then, you're not an English professor, are you?

3.) Where did you get the idea that freedom of the press, as an inalienable right, is something to be "allowed"?

4.) Your notion that freedom of the press "didn't exist, really, until the 1960s" is novel. When may we expect your monograph on this theme?

5.) Fuck you, you stupid fucking hayseed fuck.

IDIOTS ABROAD. David Frum has visited Stockholm, which is a beautiful city. He thinks so too but, having a busy propagandist's brain, twists its elegance and grandeur into proof of Sweden's statist perfidy. The argument, such as it is, is hard to follow, but among the breadcrumby ideas Frum leaves for us are these:

The parkland in the central city likewise testifies to the power of monarchs: what is now a treed enclave of museums was once the headquarters of the royal Swedish navy; a few blocks away is the park that was once the garrison of the king’s household troops...

The shock of the Great Depression put an end to Sweden’s flirtation with what the Swedes call liberalism -- and they quickly reverted to older instincts: an all-powerful and highly centralized state.

And so today as in 1800, a grand aristocracy of career politicians, civil servants, and favored businesses benefit from the system: the prime minister lives in an 18th century palace compared to which 10 Downing Street looks like a cramped little rowhouse...

Perhaps Frum spent so much of his Washington tenure inside the White House that he didn't have time to run out front and similarly expostulate on the architectural subtext of the 132-room mansion surrounded by concrete battlements that serves as our own seat of executive power.

Or maybe he just has the same problem as Tacitus: it's tough to bloviate with a straight face about bad old Europe while you are enjoying its largesse, hospitality, and beauty. But (in the immortal words of Lorenzo St. DuBois) they try, oh, how they try!

...TRY, TRY AGAIN. OpinionJournal bard Mark Helprin doesn't like the way the war is going, so he suggests what he imagines to be a new approach:

We already have ceded part of Sunni Iraq: What remains is to pick a strongman, see him along, arrange a federation, hope for the best, remount the army, and retire, with or without Saudi permission, to the Saudi bases roughly equidistant to Damascus, Baghdad, and Riyadh.

Yeah, it worked so well the last time.

MEAN GIRLS. Professor Reynolds and his acolytes are in full splutter over somebody who writes about blogs in the Toronto Star. One should think they'd be grateful that anyone bothers to write about our little hobby -- which probably ranks in share-of-cultural-consciousness somewhere between spray-on hair and Ultimate Frisbee -- yet they snarl at columnist Antonia Zurbisias like dissed teenagers, both at Fort Insta ("Fat, drunk, and Canadian," "fool," etc) and in Zurbisias' in-box ("blousy," "fat and stupid," etc). Small wonder that many of these geniuses' retorts are weight-related -- considering that they find Anne Coulter toothsome, normally constituted women must look positively zaftig to them.

Among the annoyed is the madman Lileks, last noted here for tracking the source of our civilization's "rot" to Guy de Maupassant and dictionary editors. Today he re-adjusts his rot-detector and finds a new fountain of evil: Hunter S Thompson!

And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Yes, many's the time I've read the metamphetamine-fueled ravings of R.W. Apple or George Will and detected the sinister hand of Thompson, Patron Saint of Journalists.

Speaking of ravings, Tacitus goes to Europe, seems to miss all the cathedrals and museums, and instead sees only statist ugliness caused by Social Democrats. And he's sure that waitress didn't like him because he's American. The cough syrup wears off and and he allows as how, "despite the griping, I like Europe, and come back at every opportunity" -- to remind the natives, as he does here, how we bailed their asses out in WWII, one supposes. This is in the perplexing tradition of conservatives like Bob Bartley and Ned Flanders who address their European "friends" with obvious and corrosive contempt, then wonder why Europeans don't like them.

For the most part this stuff is really beyond the realm of politics, and into that of abnormal pyschology. But I'm beginning to get the feeling that most of what passes for political discourse is that way these days.

SATURDAY NIGHT MISCELLANY. Saw a couple movies recently. Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is pretty good. The premise is terrific: given the chance to wipe a defunct love from your memory, would you abate your romantic torment by wiping it, or would you allow the experience to teach you something? Kaufman seems to assume that most of us, given the tech, would wipe. That's a canny observation, but he loads the deck too much by making the wipers such morons that they cannot articulate any sound philosophical reasons for doing it. Kaufman has guts, but lacks the dramatic training to acknowledge and exploit his own dialectic. Bad ideas exist for a reason, and the desire to deny experience, rather than work through it, has a lot of resonance these day. Why not give it a fair hearing? Making the wipers mere weed-addled cowards is just too easy.

(Also, wouldn't Jim Carrey wake up if Kirsten Dunst were jumping on his bed in her underwear? I know I would!)

There's still a lot to like. I admire that jealousy is a big idea in Kaufman's films. (The Farrelly Brothers are obesessed with it too; I think it's their saving grace.) I salute that he wants to explore big feelings. Even his hippie-trippy way of doing it (collapsing landscapes, ridiculous techonological McGuffins) is okay with me. But he really is too sloppy about it. If the movie followed its best instincts, Joel and Clementine would have stayed broken up. That's what romantic disappointment is really about -- not saving relationships, but improving survivors. That's why the quasi-reconciliation ending is such a drag, and probably why the studio put it on a shelf for so long.

Also saw Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes -- a total piece of shit, so weak and rambling and wasteful that it made me hate the Jarmusch movies I used to love, and I've been following him since Chang in a Void Moon. How dare he foist these feeble improvisations on paying customers? Even Iggy, Tom Waits, and Bill Murray look like patsies in this. Thank God for Taylor Mead and Bill Rice, who bring some much-needed dignity to the proceedings.

Fortunately I got some brain-balm from an old S.J. Perelman collection, Keep It Crisp. I've tried to enjoy SJP on the page before and failed; though his lines for Groucho are sublime ("Ah, I could dance with you till the cows come home -- better yet, I'll dance with the cows till you come home"), large blocks of his wordplay always seemed to me rather too much of a good thing before. But once you get into a rhythm with him he's wonderful, and not all the pleasures are from surface effects. Among the better items is an invented interview by a sweet young thing of a Broadway wise guy ("A Power Dive into the New Journalism"):

As soon as we were alone, Dexteride's air of reserve vanished. He mixed two ginger-ale highballs, adjusted the Venetian blind so that the sun wouldn't shine in my eyes while I was writing, and seated himself on the davenport by me. I told him our readers wanted to know what he was thinking about Tommy Manville these days. He frowned.

"Hats off to that question," he said seriously. "It's a good one. I'd say that Tommy is a man that is in the prime of his life at present." His eyes twinkled. "Funny thing about age. Now, I place you about eighteen years of age."

"I'll be twenty-three in March."

"Then I'm in the clear, he said, with a deep, full-throated chuckle that was thoroughly infectious. You knew instinctively that this warm, friendly man enjoyed simple things and people, and still there was a wholesome faith, almost akin to idealism, about him. Somehow I saw him standing at the right hand of King John on the Field of the Cloth of Gold as the Magna Carta was being signed. I asked him to outline his personal philosophy.

"I believe the day is coming when it will be possible to tell a person's age from his hands," he said. "I've made a study of the subject over the last few years. Take yours, for instance." To illustrate his theory, he gently manipulated my fingers, showing how excessive writing causes fatigue and how the soft cup of the palm acts as a cushion.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "a girl with your type hands shouldn't be engaged in your particular type work. You ought to have a little spot of your own, which you could stick around all afternoon in merely a kimona and play with a little poodle or so"...

The inspiration is a certain style of magazine-writing from the War Years, but the gag is out of Restoration Comedy, or maybe Chaucer. Hats off to SJP!

Of course, if you want to survey the work of a vastly inferior modern author, you may read some of my latest here.

THE ANTI-ZENGERS. Boy, OpinionJournal is going absolutely batshit crazy these days. Their lead editorial today comes out against the fucking Red Cross. What's next -- a stinging rebuke to Santa Claus?

Pentagon critics are treating a leaked Red Cross assessment -- first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday -- as proof that detainee abuse was widespread in Iraq and that the military was unresponsive to complaints. After reading the report, we think the real story is the increasing politicization of this venerable humanitarian group.

Apparently OJ's mad because the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)'s report on our inhumane treatment of prisoners of war got leaked, and the Red Cross hasn't lied about it to preserve our torturers' anonymity. (It is strange, then, that OJ doesn't take a monent here to also chastise the Journal's reporters for disseminating this anti-disinformation to the public. Maybe even OJ writers get tired of being laughed at.)

The screed closes:

This ICRC behavior poses a serious risk to its relationship with governments around the world, as well as to its special status when there are future revisions of the Geneva Conventions. We hope that some adults inside the organization understand this, because the ICRC's self-inflicted demise would be a real loss for prisoners of regimes that are truly odious.

Nice little international organization ya got here. Be a shame if someone was ta undercut its credibility, if ya know what I mean!

Meanwhile another story in their Arts & Leisure section (you know, one of those dark alleys where conservatives dig through works of art for political talking points) talks about the "incendiary power" of photojournalism as if it were black magic or something. The author, Eric Gibson, approves government suppression of war photos ("Think only of the way that pictures and film footage," he shudders, "actually did turn public opinion against the Vietnam War"), and apprently takes from Abu Ghraib only one lesson ("besides the obvious moral one," he tosses off): that we better do something about that damned new technology -- "another photographic medium that would do the damage this time around: the digital image, snapped on a camera carried in the pocket of an enlisted man or woman and e-mailed across the ether."

OJ apparently finds chaste prom dresses Tony, and freedom of the press Tacky. You'd have to dig very deep to find "journalists" so deeply committed as these to the antithesis of every journalistic principle -- in fact, all the way to the other side of the world.

LEARN TO READ. In defending the indefensible (i.e., himself), John Derbyshire aligns his brutal judgement on Abu Ghraib (i.e., torture all you want, just don’t include sex, consensual or otherwise) with Orwell:

One of the many things Orwell taught us (see, e.g., his essay on Kipling) is that the dirty work of civilization -- the work of policemen, prison guards, soldiers, interrogators of terrorist suspects -- is *dirty*. It's rough work, and won't always meet the standards of my and your personal lives. Someone is doing it on our behalf, though, right now -- not just in Baghdad, but in jails and police stations across America, and honesty compels us to acknowledge their work, and the much greater horrors it helps keep at bay.

I have no doubt Derbyshire is steeped in Kipling ("It’s ‘Tommy’ this, and ‘Tommy’ that, and ‘Tommy, wait outside’/But it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the trooper’s on the tide," and all that), but his understanding of Orwell on Kipling seems poor, if this is the essay he’s talking about:

It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct -- on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And so on. Orwell’s appreciation of Kipling was real, but in defending him against the "refined people," he was certainly not defending Kipling’s enthusiasm for "Imperialism as a sort of forcible evangelizing" -- Orwell’s words, which Derbyshire would seem to take as an unequivocal endorsement.

Orwell was sensible of the difference between "the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook" – Kipling’s – "and the modern gangster outlook" -- represented by the Fascism at which England was then at war. Orwell seems to have preferred the former, at least in terms of moral clarity, but he was also well aware that "Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern."

I think a lot of conservatives latch onto Orwell because he talks smack about liberals, and there is certainly an abundance of this in his Kipling essay. (Of course, they tend to elide the inconvenient fact of Orwell’s Socialism, and now that Christopher Hitchens has loosened his own grip of that banner, they generally prefer to get their Orwellism from him.) One would think, though, that moral absolutists such as they would not mistake the sharing of an annoyance with a commonality of interest – unless their only genuine interest is to talk smack about liberals, which seems to be the case.

THE CROSSROADS OF ART, COMMERCE, AND THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS. Snarkmarket has discovered what Maya Lin, creator of the exquisite Vietnam Memorial in Washington, has been up to lately: designing lawn furniture.

Well, time for me to get back to work...

WISH IT INTO THE CORNFIELD, PART #3,451. Andrew Sullivan reads the Times' coverage of the Berg execution, and doesn't like that Berg's family was interviewed -- or, rather, that they said some things that don't line up with the sort of "dulce est decorum est" horseshit in which Sullivan specializes, and the Times printed it:

The family of Nicholas E. Berg challenged American military officials on Wednesday, insisting that the man beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Iraq had earlier been in the custody of federal officials who should have done more to protect him...

The Iraqi police took Nicholas Berg, 26, into custody on March 24 and held him in a jail that he described in the message as managed by Iraqis with oversight from United States Military Police forces. He wrote that federal agents had questioned his reasons for being in Iraq, whether he had ever built a pipe bomb or had been in Iran.

"They can detain him and deny him his basic civil rights of a lawyer, a phone call or even a charge for 13 days, but they can't get him" on a plane, David Berg said.

"Yes, the family's understandable anger should be reported," concedes Sully. "But their anger should not dictate the entire gist of your story." See, it's not newsworthy that the family of the deceased is pissed at the U.S. Government -- or not propaganda-worthy, anyway. Axis of Evil, why we fight, stay the course -- that's journalism, by God!

Sullivan gets multiple unmitigated-gall points for following this up with a letter from his readership: "I just saw the Nick Berg video in its entirety... I really feel extremely bad for Nick's family. I wish I could give each one of them a big hug and say 'I love you' to them." Make sure you clamp a hand over their mouths when you hug them, buddy, or Sullivan might hear something he doesn't like.

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.