DOCTRINAL MATTERS AS EXPLAINED BY THE PENGUINS. Re the Oklahoma City Bombers, Kerry expresses the traditional, Cuomoesque argument against the death penalty: "Dying is scary for a while, but in the end, the punishment is gone," so life in prison might be a more convincing threat.

So NRO's Rich Lowry, offscreen, asks, "Do you believe in hell? He seemed to say on MTP that the only punishment in dying is the act of dying itself. But if you are a faithful Catholic like Kerry don't you believe someone like Tim McVeigh, an unrepentant mass murderer, is in for an eternity of punishment?"

They're really working this Catholic thing, aren't they? When I was in the Church, though, back in the metal-ruler era, we were specifically cautioned by the nuns against assuming that anyone was in Hell -- or in Heaven, for that matter, excepting the Saints, who were in for sure because the Pope said so.

This message was illustrated by anecdotes of sudden, unforeseeable death suffered by children just like ourselves, meant to convince us that we could be saved or damned in an instant, and that we had better make sure that instant came before we were run over by a bus or suffocated in a sand-pit, and not after. Repent, in other words, before it's too late.

So the idea that the worst human being might be saved at the last moment strikes me as very Catholic. See also the Good Thief.

I would ask if Lowry is Catholic, but it doesn't matter -- that guy could be talking about what it's like to be Rich Lowry and he'd still be talking out his ass.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION. Every so often OpinionJournal has to publish someone's tedious poli-sci journal article and call it an "Extra." This week Zachary Selden gets the nod. He argues that the foreign policy adventuresomeness that we call "neoconservative" is not weird and phenomenonal, as some imagine, but old-fashioned and American, and based on "a set of policies that flow from two ideas that resonate deeply in American public opinion."

There's a lot to cavil here. The first of the abovementioned resonant ideas, for example, Selden says "is often credited to Woodrow Wilson, but in some ways its roots stretch back into the 18th century. It is founded on the moral assertions that have been part of American political thought since the early days of the republic. Chief among them is the idea that individual liberty is a moral absolute and that a system of governance that enshrines individual liberty is morally and practically superior to all others." Europeans can't understand all this, Selden sniffs: their "constitutions tend to place a greater emphasis on social harmony than on individual liberty."

Looked at a certain way, this is unobjectionable. But the culmination of Wilson's dream was not the establishment of a perpetual, roving gang of democratizers, but of the League of Nations -- in which cause he was at least grudgingly supported by a good many of those social-hamonist Europeans, but scuttled by his own people. In fact, Wilson failed precisely to the degree that he tried to promote American ideals to Americans. By the time we get to Iraq -- hell, by the time we get to Panama and the Philippines -- the connection between our love of liberty and our feckless foreign adventures seems not only severed, but hacked to pieces.

And this is why windy policy dissertations like Selden's frustrate me (along with the big words, of course, and compound sentences). They're all about the big ideas which allegedly animate our political actors. Frankly, in most cases I see something a whole lot less philosophical going on -- unless you consider "I got mine, don't worry about yours" a philosophy.

It may just be my ignorance, but I don't see much of any coherent idea, let alone a grand Wilsonian schema, behind the actions of this Administration. I see Bush buffeted by peddlers of crank ideas whose patrons managed in early days to squeeze through the portals of power and grab a place near the President ear. I see, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, a tendency to go with what Cheney and the wise men suggested, and Cheney and the wise men slapping their best and brightest on the back and whispering, "OK, kid, you're on." And, of course, the usual graft, fraud, ass-covering -- and, above all, deep faith that Americans will fall for any old horseshit you care to peddle if you wrap it in a flag and drawl over it like John Wayne. (Selden's view is that Americans have been moved off their usual anti-interventionist dime by 9-11, but it was no preordained thing that they would be moved to fight Iraq -- that was pure salesmanship.)

I respect erudition in any field, but Selden's article strikes me as justification after the fact. The Founding Fathers had great, free-wheeling intellects, and wrote a lot more than their puny descendents, so it is not hard to find something in them to use as justification for any old scam you want to pull. How many times have right-wing nuts used Andrew Jackson's "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" as a historical imprimatur for their fight against whichever branch of the government happens to piss them off?

FORCED TO ACKNOWLEDGE AN UNPLEASANT REALITY. Xax has been offline for many weeks, and I don't know when it will come back, so I have replaced it on my blogroll with Something Awful. You probably know about them already, but I figure it's good to have an "eject" button handy that will take you from the moaning and groaning that goes on here to a very funny place.

CRAZY ON THE COUCH.I have to say I was taken aback by the ill-concealed rage in Crazy Jesus Lady's latest, an account of E.L. Doctorow's speech at Hofstra and his comeuppance. Normally she speaks of her many enemies in a dismissively gentle tone, as though it were more Satan's fault than theirs that they have been led unto sin and therefore damned. But she calls Doctorow "Fast Eddy," talks ahout his "boorishness,' and claims that Doctorow "manages to produce many books nobody reads in the computer age while still using a quill." (I think she means Doctorow uses the quill, not the non-readers. That's how mad CJL is -- she can't even properly place her modifiers!)

Why such spasmodic rage? One idea is suggested by a gag the New Yorker pulled at Crazy's expense in April. In one of their "Hundred Days" multiple-choice questions about current events, they asked readers to match bits of commentary on Bush with their authors. Four of the five selections were devastatingly negative ("worst President ever") and authored by people like Richard Reeves and Michael Kinsley. One, though, went like this: "A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." And this was the Crazy Jesus Lady's.

CJL has been well-compensated for her speechwriting and is praised in wingnut circles for her columns and books. Insofar as her world extends, this would seem a sufficient Valhalla for a loyal operative. But you can tell by her occasional cracks about "intellectuals, academics, [and] local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants," that Crazy is no less affected than others of her sort by that primitive jealousy stirred by the success of credentialed types who sneer at all that is holy and Republican yet somehow, inexplicably, are allowed by the Lord to enjoy good reviews and tenure. For all her faith that the Lord will one day bring her home, she would yet like to make a stop along the way at Montparnasse, and there be made much of. Alas, the nobs think her a outre Pollyanna, and she must settle for the approbation of think-tank nerds and other Crazy Jesus Ladies and Gentlemen.

How it must sting to be excluded and then mocked for her own exclusion. So the Doctorow booing must have come as a waterfall of balm to her scourged ego. In her ecstasy of vindication, she may have forgotten to behave toward Doctorow as a Christian; but that's why the Lord made confessional booths.

JUST WEIRD:

If you have heard the hits "My Baby Loves Lovin"', "Beach Baby", "United We Stand", "Gimme Dat Ding", "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" and the unforgettable Coke commercial "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," you have definitely heard Tony Burrows... Tony Burrows is listed in the Guiness Book of records as having had the most records in the charts at the same time under different names.

BTW, did you know that Albert Hammond wrote "Gimme Dat Ding," and "It Never Rains in Southern California" AND "The Air That I Breathe" AND "Free Electric Band," among others?

It is something to contemplate that so many of the cherished songs of my youth were manufactured by a small gang of studio hacks.

CULTURAL ANALYSIS: AN EXCITING NEW CAREER OPTION FOR REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES. Jens 'n' Frens explains a Simpsons episode:

...Burns, upon discovering (as he did in at least one previous ep, but never mind that) that he's unpopular, decides to buy out all of the town's media. Lisa is publishing her own paper, though, and continues through a certain amount of harassment. At the end she gives up, but everyone else in town starts their own newspapers.

The mainstream media aren't all run by the same person, but until a few years ago, they were all run by the same New York City/Washington DC mindset. As I've said before, the liberal media haven't been getting any less liberal, but more conservative alternatives have grown around them -- most notably Fox News, but also a multitude of independent bloggers...

So Burns is the New York Times, and Lisa is Fox News. Or maybe Little Green Footballs.

Well, if they'll buy Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, they might buy this, too.

IF YOU DRINK, DON'T GOOGLE. IF YOU DRINK AND GOOGLE, DON'T POST. Matt Welch does some contrarian schtick that goes badly awry:

I know it must be pretty to think that liberals = free speech, and conservatives = duct tape on lips, but that's a cliché that has long outlived its axiomaticism... A Google search on "free speech" and "National Review" yields 32,400 results; one on "free speech" and "Los Angeles Magazine" produces 207 (there are 481 "free speech" results on NRO's site alone).

Testing Welch's methodology, I googled "Hitler" and "Jews" -- 507,000 hits. Then I googled "George W. Bush" and "Jews" -- only 172,000.

So let's not hear any of this axiomaticism about Hitler being against the Jews! Why, he talked about them all the time! He certainly approved of them way more than that Bush guy.

I'm sure National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg -- an admitted and tireless crusader for censorship, by the way -- is happy about Welch's confusion. He may be allergic to free speech, but free publicity is something else again.

POLITICAL WEBLOGGING CAN BE DEPRESSING. Here's Andrew Stuttaford explaining that, when people use the term "Taliban wing" to describe social policy meddlers, that's just silly, but when he uses the term "health mullahs" to describe our social health policy meddlers (a group I'm not in love with either), that's an appropriate use of rhetoric.

More and more often when I sit down to fill one of these little blogger screens I feel like one of the monkeys in the prologue to "2001," joining in the shrieking and jumping up and down and general primitive social aggression.

One alternative might be to approach analysis seriously and politely, which in the current environment would be like delivering a long lecture on the Good and the True while undergraduates stick matches into my shoes and light them, hold up fingers behind my head, and make fart noises.

Another would be to just pack it in, disappointing literally dozens of fans.

I wonder if you guys ever feel this way.

LITERARY QUOTES FOR A WARM MAY NIGHT.

Thus he was forced to endure the importunities of the young-old man, whose drunken state obscurely urged him to pay the stranger the honor of a formal farewell. "We wish you a very pleasant sojourn," he babbled, bowing and scraping. "Pray keep us in mind. Au revoir, excusez et bon jour, votre Excellence." He drooled, he blinked, he licked the corner of his mouth, the little imperial bristled on his elderly chin. He put the tips of two fingers to his mouth and said thickly, "Give her our love, will you, the p-pretty dear..." Here his upper plate came away and fell down on the lower one... Aschenbach escaped. "Little sweety-sweety-sweetheart," he heard behind him, gurgled and stuttered, as he climbed down the rope stair into the boat.
--Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"

I wer programmit then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my head ben ful of words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots. Back then I ben thinking on the Power of the 2 and the 1 and the Hy Power what ben whoosing roun the Power Ring time back way back. The 1 Big 1 and the Spirit of God. My mind ben all binsy with myndy thinking. Thinking who wer going to do what and how I myt put some thing to gether before some 1 else done it. Seed of the red and seed of the yeller and that. Hart of the wud. Now I dint want nothing of that. I dint know what the connnexion were with that face in my mynd only I knowit that face wer making me think diffrent. I wernt looking for no Hy Power no mor I dint want no Power at all. I dint want to do nothing with that yellerboy stoan n mor. Greanvine wer the name I put to that face in my mynd.

I cud feal some thing growing in me wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER.

Ther come in to my muynd then music or the idear of music I dont know what it wer if I try to hear it now I cant only I know I heard it then. It wer as much colours as it wer souns only if I try to see the colours now I cant. The souns and the colours they be come a moving and I thot I could move with it.

--Russell Hoban, "Riddley Walker"

Now, my Friend, can Prophecies, or miracles convince You, or Me, that infinite Benevolence, Wisdom and Power, created and preserves, for a time, innumerable millions to make them miserable forever; for his own Glory? Wretch! What is his Glory? Is he ambitious? does he want promotion? Is he vain? tickled with Adulation? Exulting and tryumphing in his Power and the Sweetness of his Vengence? Pardon me, my Maker, for these aweful Questions. My Answer to them is always ready: I believe no such Things. My Adoration of the Author of the Universe is too profound and too sincere. The Love of God and his Creation; delight, Joy, Tryumph, Exultation in my own existence, 'tho but an Atom, a Molecule Organique, in the Universe; are my religion. Howl, Snarl, bite, Ye Calvinistick! Ye Athanasian Divines, if You will. Ye will say, I am no Christian: I say Ye are no Christians: and there the account is ballanced. Yet I believe all the honest men among you, are Christians in My Sense of the Word.

--John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 14, 1813

The Ampitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were as narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and grey and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating sea of Democratic faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had travelled in an unbroken line from the throng who had cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all -- politics in an abbatoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom to this convention; some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with arcomegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing-aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis-players communicated with the estate holders. The Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.

--Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago"

When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is NOT well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold-blooded falsehoods. "The will to believe" cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

--William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience"

I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, believe none of us. To a nunnery, go.

--William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"

MEET-UP 2. I came back to the event and found a dozen nice young people sitting around cross-legged, drinking white wine, and talking about classes at the New School. It was obvious that no one was going to get laid.

Fortunately there were some beers left in the fridge, and these I freely availed. My suggestion that we exercise our Second Amendment rights on behalf of the Kerry campaign -- or at least affix "KILL BUSH" stickers to public spaces throughout the midtown area during the Republican Convention -- fell, this website's government monitors will be disappointed to hear, on deaf ears. Finally I left before I was made to leave. All in all a successful evening by my pathetic standards.

MEET-UP. A friend for whom, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,the word "well-meaning" was invented in 1347 by Thomas Usk, invited me to a Kerry "Meet-Up" this evening on Avenue C. It was very odd to find myself in a well-scrubbed triplex with a terrace overlooking a terrain wherein, some years earlier, friends of mine copped heroin, and where I was on one occasion chased by riot cops. The hostesses were perfectly nice women who radiated positive energy as if it were an organic fragrance from the Body Shop; I felt rank with the odor of despair by comparison. Their early guests were well-turned-out young people, some with children who clomped stairs and bawled as John Kerry addressed us (and thousands of other positive partiers across America) by speakerphone. We listened respectfully as the candidate stammered and confused verb tenses. Among the adjectives he used for the Bush Administration was "childish," and I notice Kerry, for all his thickness of tongue, is occasionally given to these perfectly apt usages, and that these are the ones his enemies hammer most mercilessly.

Everyone was cheerful and politically astute, which as you may imagine made me feel alienated. So I left. But I may go back. I donated $20, after all, and am only half drunk.

WORD. "I'm tired of having my patriotism questioned by people who think Thomas Jefferson was a sitcom character... why the fuck should I be forced to treat their opinions as if they were equally as valid as my own? You wouldn't ask a six year old how to tune a Lamborghini's engine, so why should you care about the political opinions of people who can't point out their own goddamn country on a map?... I don't give a shit what some semi-literate Midwestern retard who's never been more than two hundred miles from home and whose idea of intellectual exercise is watching "Jeopardy" thinks about the intricacies of Islamic theology as it relates to the metaphysical notion of jihad. Fuck him."

Onto the blogroll with Zen Archery.

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.