YET ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR KERRY. Via The Nation, spotted by eagle-eye Margaret:

The Democratic party platform that will be adopted this week includes one particularly significant change from the platforms adopted by the party conventions of 1992, 1996 and 2000. During the platform-writing process, the drafting committee quietly removed the section of the document that endorsed capital punishment. Thus, for the first time since the 1980s, Democrats will not be campaigning on a pro-death penalty program.

It appears Kerry, who doesn't "wear his faith on his sleeve," has more in common with Jesus than the famously born-again Bush. Don't worry, George, you can always trumpet your strong personal relationship with Hammurabi!

SHORTER DIANA WEST: My kinfolk don't hate fags proudly, as I do. Damned liberal media!

THE BIG STIFF IN PRIME TIME. I don’t mean to be rude, but much as I want it to work (and it could very well work), I cannot suspend a morbid consciousness of the political purpose of John Kerry’s DNC honor guard tonight.

Max Cleland is a very old-fashioned sort of politician, never mind the wheelchair. He looks proud and wounded all at the same time, and his face glistens in the hard light, as every Southern politician’s has since the days of Henry Clay, and like the most successful of them Cleland seems to enjoy rather than tolerate it. "My body was broken and my faith was shattered…. Although I had lost a lot, I still had a lot left. I resolved to make something of my life." This guy makes me ashamed, as he is supposed to. And you can get a lot of uplift out of that kind of shame in a situation like this.

"No Surrender." That’s a good choice – like all the songs on Born in the U.S.A., tinged with enough despair and regret to make it easier to really take to heart than Bon Jovi.

OK, this’ll be long. Better settle in. But I expect he’ll rush; they all have.

"I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty." Holy shit.

"…because we love our country… united in one purpose: to make America stronger at home and respected in the world. A great American novelist wrote, ‘You can’t go home again.’" Quick, conservatives – find Thomas Wolfe’s commie credentials!

"I was born in the West Wing." Good thing there’s a TV show. "Mother was the rock of our family…" Oh, here’s the personal touch Teresa didn’t put in. "Den mother when I was a Cub Scout… gave me her passion for the environment… march for full equality for all women…" Boy, she sounds like a handful.

"Father… first baseball mitt… Greatest Generation… in the State Department… " Another handful. "I rode my bike into Soviet East Berlin… he promptly grounded me." Ha ha. "Fear in the eyes of people who were not free." I see where this will get to. "I learned what it meant to be America at her best… determined to restore that pride to all that look to America." Do we see that in the Iraqi citizens’ eyes, or fear of the Abu Ghraib torturer? That’s a nut-cutter there, and explains all the toy drives at Instapundit.

"The great gift of service… a Junior, John Kennedy…" Got it. "We believed we could change to world, and you know what? We did… but tonight… we’re going to write the next great chapter… change the world, but only if we are true to our ideals and that starts by telling the truth to the American people… that is my first pledge to you… I will restore trust and credibility to the White House…" Craggy-face Kerry as the voice of youthful America.

"As a young prosecutor… balanced budget… 100,000 police on the streets of America… finally made peace in Vietnam." Nice, tight resume. "Commander-in-Chief who will never mislead us into war… a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the military, and an Attorney General who will uphold the Constitution of the United States." Yeah, not like those weirdos we have now.

"Here is our answer: there is nothing more pessimistic than saying that America can’t do better. We’re the optimists, we’re the can-do people… look at the 90s… we just need to believe in ourselves and we can do it again…" Oh, yeah, Clinton, don’t you miss him?

"I am proud that at my side…John Edwards… his life is the American dream…" Every little boy can grow up to be a rich lawyer. Well, it’s true! "Succeed Dick Cheney…" Oh, sorry I was mean to JE. "What can I say about Teresa?" You’ll be asked to, of course. I loved her dipping her head to JE’s shoulder. Maybe by her very weirdness she’s an asset. I don’t mind watching her do her loopy thing for four years.

"Our band of brothers… what we learned as soldiers… every day is extra." That’s ‘Nam talk, son. "We may be a little older… still know how to fight…" You gotta love it -- Uncommon Valor.

"September 11… strength that our firefighters… rescuers… Flight 93… flags were hanging from front porches… it was the worst day that we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us… we were only Americans, and how we wish it had stayed that way…"

It’s all one, you see, the Zen of liberalism. Every facet of public life – fighting terrorism and health care and tax policy -- feeds into the other.

"There are those that criticize me for seeing complexities…" Okay, I’m complex, you got my vote! "Proclaiming ‘Mission Accompished’ certainly doesn’t make it so." Snap. "I will bring back that time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because it wants to, it only goes to war because it has to… I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in battle… On my first day of office… never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace. I know what we have to do in Iraq… I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President." Who is this guy, George McClellan?

"I will never hesitate to respond… no veto over national security… add 40,000 military troops, not in Iraq…" At last, forward thinking. "And we will end the back door draft of the National Guard and Reservists." Hello, this really is news. What about the Coast Guard?

"Strength is more than tough words… I know the reach of our power… we need to make America a beacon… looked up to, not just feared… tell the terrorists… the future doesn’t belong to fear, it belongs to freedom." See citizen, Iraq.

"Right here on our shores… 9/11 commission… I will not evade or equivocate… 98% of our container ships… nuclear and chemical plants… not opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in the United States of America." His case on competence grounds.

"To those who would question the patriotism… wrapping themselves in the flag… what America is really about… when Americans stand up… that is not a challenge to patriotism, it is the heart and soul of patriotism. You see that flag up there? We call her Old Glory… I fought under that flag…" We know! "From the gun-turret…" We know! "Draped the casket…" We know!! "It belongs to all the American people!"

What are they going to remember? That John Kerry fought in Vietnam and no one better even hint he’s a traitor.

The crowd chants USA! USA! Kerry still wants to hurry through this. "My fellow citizens… Those who talk about family values should start valuing families… taking cops off the street so Enron can get another tax break… big drug companies… windfall profits… I will not privatize Social Security, I will not cut benefits… family, faith, hard work… that is the American Dream…" Kerry as Boston Irish politician, beating the same pulpit (not literally, of course) as a 19th-century Mick alderman pledging the workingman a better deal.

"Dave McKuen, a steelworker…" This is a good story – oh, it’s not a story? "Marianne Knowles, a woman with breast cancer…" Hey, this is a good – oh. "Deborah Kromins…" That’s – "25% of our children in Harlem… people sleeping in Lafayette Park… three million…" Well, that was a fast transition from the specific to the general. But narrative is a vanishing art.

"Middle class not being squeezed but doing better… new incentives… manufacturing… good-paying jobs… close the tax loopholes… reward companies that keep jobs in the good old U.S.A… never have to subsidize the loss of his own job… give the American worker a fair playing field, there’s no one in the world that he can’t compete against." Seamus O’Kerry will save your full dinner pail!

"We won’t raise taxes on the middle class, you’ve heard a lot of false charges… roll back the tax cuts on wealthier Americans… making over $200,000 a year…" Some gnome is now rushing to find a $200,000 a year family who can’t make ends meet under ee-vil Kerry.

"Stop being a nation content to spend $10,000 to send a young man to prison… Head Start, Smart Start… a real start…" The old playbook.

"Health care… 4 million people have lost their health care… your payments, your premiums… save families $1000 a year… under our health care plan… Medicare will negotiate lower drug prices… less expensive… a right for all Americans…" That’s the playbook again, and it sounds as good as ever. We will of course have to wait for the bill of particulars, emphasis on "bill."

"Independent of Mideast oil…" Another good page from the playbook. "…not the Saudi Royal family." Yeah, you know, those guys Bush is mobbed up with. Victor Davis Hanson will deliver another rant distancing The Movement from the Saudis, but no one on the hustings reads Victor Davis Fucking Hanson.

"Benjamin Franklin could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com." You mean we don’t have to listen to much more of this?

"Let me address these words directly to George W. Bush… let’s respect one another… never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in human history, the Constitution of the United States…" What can I say? When he’s right, he’s right.

"Big ideas, not small-minded attacks… divide group from group… maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us united in one America, Red, White, and Blue… America is not ‘us’ and ‘them’… I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve, but faith has given me hope… Abraham Lincoln… I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side." Good, he stopped talking for a few seconds, at just the right time and in just the right way.

"They’re American values… if we believe in them, we can build… so much promise stretches before us… " Kitty Hawk. NASA. Microsoft. "WE did that… and now it’s our time to ask, ‘What if?’" Alzheimers, AIDS, stem cells. "A President who believes in science…" A choice, not a idjit. "Do what adults should do…" Oh yeah.

"Patrolling the Mekong…" We kn-- – oh, forget it. "Literally all in the same boat… that is the kind of America… all in the same boat…. Look to the next horizon.. our best days are still to come… Good night, God Bless You and God Bless The United States of America."

Cue "Beautiful Day." I hear a lot smack about the music here, but this is just perfect.

As oratory it was rushed, monochromatic, and lackluster. But. This guy is alright, and he’s running against Bush. Well, you know what I think. What do you think?

UPDATE. From The Corner: "Um, Mr. Kerry, 'that flag,' that 'Old Glory,' that 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' flew upside down on the cover of your book 'The New Soldier.' So why don't you explain that?"

Translation: they're scared shitless.

UPDATE II. Some of my comrades seem to think I've been too hard on the Big Stiff. Let me be clear. I think Kerry should do well based on tonight's performance, but I insist in judging it by Olympian standards. Why? Because, as the man said, there is nothing more pessimistic than saying that America can’t do better.

Don't worry that there is a chorus of idiots spinning the speech down. (I see Lileks, at the lunar end of one of his frequent mood swings, believes a Kerry Presidency will lead to "a smoking crater in New York." Count on it, Prairie Putz; New Yorkers will vote big for that smoking crater!) They're all in the blogosphere, which, as far as Mr. and Mrs. America know, is one long, contiguous series of mothers' basements where stained-shirted Comic Book Guys lurk and play at politics. Which means that they may have well have the wisdom to elect the right guy.

SHORTER JOHN PODHORETZ. John Edwards's expression of concern for ordinary Americans is an obvious rip-off of George W. Bush.

(There's also a lot in there about how the candidate made a lot of promises in hopes of being elected. I don't know why they didn't run this baby on page one.)

INCLUDING "AND" AND "THE." So far the Dems have kept their Convention pretty clean and un-mean. Fortunately for the rightwing "reporters" on the case, very few people are actually watching, so they can just plain make shit up.

The New York Post, for example, decries "the Democrats' timeless tactic of trying to split Americans by wealth and income, urging everyone to hate 'the rich.'" And I decry -- oh, who am I kidding? I am tickled by -- the Post's timeless tactic of using a quasi-quotation to imply linkage between a slur and its target. "The rich," which I heard in none of the speeches last night, could in a pinch be nailed to anyone on the Convention floor (perhaps a Michigan alternate saying "I love the rich taste of Folger's crystals" within earshot of a Post hack); having established that, the Post just adds "hate" and gets itself a perfect picture of a Socialist Worker rally brimming with bushy-bearded bohos and spherical black bombs.

Of course, why stop at tarring the Convention? Club for Growth President Stephen Moore paints a nightmarish portrait of Boston itself:

The panoramic shots of the convention give the impression that there's no one here in Beantown but middle-class, flag-waving, child-hugging bus drivers and construction workers and soccer moms and grandmothers...

Don't be fooled by the spinmeisters. These people are not middle America. When you go into the bakeries, you can actually purchase wedding cakes with two brides on the top. A baker tells me even straight couples are purchasing these ultra-chic wedding cakes, as a sign of solidarity. The best-selling t-shirt shows George Washington standing aside George W. Bush. Under Washington the caption reads: "Could not tell a lie." Under Bush the caption: "Could not tell the truth." Every third car has a bumper sticker screaming: "RE-DEFEAT BUSH IN 2004."

Boston -- Sodom on the Charles! Later, Moore adds, "two antiwar protesters with 'Make Love, Not War' shirts (I'm not making this up) strutted in front of my taxi and shouted expletives, daring us to run them over." I love the "I'm not making this up." He should have repeated it after every sentence. Maybe a few people would have believed him.

OH, BTW: The other speakers tonight were fine. Gephardt: nice fella, no President, but bless him for running with the 90s-Congressional-Democrat football, even if only to his own 40-yard-line. Daschle: A little yapping dog, but our yapping dog. Obama: Superb. A comer. Mrs. Heinz-Kerry: Reminds me of a late Ingrid Bergman character, faint and unmodulated of speech but strong, nay, steely of conviction. Not very personable, which I consider a plus in the First Lady department. Most others probably don't, but who cares what they would think if they were listening (and they aren't)? (David Brooks thinks she was "a little bit offensive" and wanted a more "personal" angle. God, why does this drip exist, let alone appear on television?)

If you prefer to read lies about all this, go here. At alicublog, we speak truth to -- well, to a couple of smart people. From our point of view, that's enough.

ORATORIO. In last night's Convention roundup, I neglected to mention Rev. Alston, the black preacher who delivered a tribute to his old swift boat skipper, John Kerry. Alston began his address in the punchy cadences of an old-fashioned Baptist preacher ("where we FOUGHT. and BLED toGETHER. Serving our COUNtry"). But like everyone else that night, he was rushing over the logical pauses in his speech, and soon the regularity of it became numbing.

Then the crowd started cheering the preacher's Kerry references, and Alston swelled up like a bullfrog and turned from shouting to roaring his address. His cadence didn't alter, but his fire was lit, and it changed the whole effect for the better. It was as if they were the bellows and he were a pipe-organ with all the stops pulled and the bass pedals pushed to the floor.

It is hard to feel the interplay of speaker and audience through the tube, because background sounds are so convoluted by the audio feed (which is why it is so easy to scramble obscene crowd chants in TV broadcasts of ballgames). It's not until the thing starts to pick up and the speaker himself catches fire that you realize he's going over.

Something like that happened to Ted Kennedy tonight. At first, short of breath, he was just Mayor Quimby grinding out the rhetorical sausage for a buncha librul Demmycrats in the Commiewealth of Taxachusetts. I almost stopped watching. I figured I'd get my kicks reading about it the next day in the New York Post ("TRAITOR TED SLAMS HERO OF 9/11").

But the temperature did rise, and so did the quality of the speech -- maybe because of the quality of the speech. The old ham actually had a few ideas (or someone did -- the Kennedys always had a good rolodex for speechwriters). The best of them were about American history, which he conflated, naturally, with Democratic history (New Deal, New Frontier, etc.) -- never more boldly or effectively than when he reached back to before the Democratic Party, or the United States, even existed, to remind us of the Declaration's "decent respect for the opinion of mankind," and to say this:

Now it is our turn to take up the cause. Our struggle is not with some monarch named George who inherited the crown -- although it often seems that way.

Our struggle is with the politics of fear and favoritism in our own time, in our own country. Our struggle, like so many others before, is with those who put their own narrow interest ahead of the public interest.

We hear echoes of past battles in the quiet whisper of the sweetheart deal, in the hushed promise of a better break for the better connected. We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before. And with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again and make America stronger at home and respected once more in the world.

That's pretty good. Tactically, it challenges the Republicans to show how their ideas fit in with American history. Sure, tell us about Lincoln -- and get some black people within camera range so it looks less risible. Tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, if you dare risk the old warrior's coming out of his grave to mount a Bull Moose challenge to your feeble "compassionate conservatism," or to agree too fulsomely and embarrassingly with your notion of Manifest Destiny. Then tell us about Reagan, whose cartoon version of the Spirit of '76 replaced the flagbearer, the drummer, and the fife player with the entrepreneur, the evangelist, and the easy-terms loanshark.

Tactics don't matter in this instance, of course. I understand very few people are watching this thing on TV. Probably even fewer have any real feeling about the American Revolution and the remarkable ideas that ignited it. Still, as a connoisseur of the game, I appreciated seeing the round played so well.

CONVENTION, ROUND ONE. I can’t devote myself to viewing all of this large, clumsy entertainment, and so missed Jimmy Carter, which I suppose is no great loss (I’ve seen him speak before).

In general, Night One seemed a little rushed. I guess the managers figured those few viewers who stumbled upon the show on their way to the Playboy Channel should sense vigor, or at least velocity, coming from the Fleet Center Though that deprived me of the great, rolling oratorical swells of yore, I understand that the modern ear is not attuned to them.

Thus Al Gore zipped through his speech, but that seemed generous of him under the circumstances – he was there to help, not to grab attention, so only his occasional shift to a low, rumbling tone indicated his old-fashioned speechifying gifts. He seemed relaxed and comfortable, especially by his usual standards. He was always better with the jokes when he wasn’t running for President. I didn’t see the embittered lunatic they talk about in the blogosphere, but that funhouse mirror is rarely reliable.

The 9/11 tribute was simple and even a little elegant, though I was strongly aware of its purpose as a touchstone for what would come later (as it did, with the Clintons using Kerry’s military record as resume lines for a Terror-era President). Cynicism or stagecraft? Depends on where you stand as you look at it.

Hillary was Hillary, and this was a good opportunity to think about what that is. I can see why some people hate her. There is always something a little hectoring in her tone, reminiscent of a grade-school teacher announcing the conditions under which next week’s field trip will be allowed. Of course this is more offensive when she is tired and grim, as she often seems to be when doing the people’s business. In this political context, though, cheerful and energized and surrounded by people who love her, she just seemed strong-willed and charismatic.

You could tell Bill Clinton’s speech was good because David Brooks on PBS did his best to piss on it ("No poetry," said Brooks; try to imagine David Brooks reading poetry for anything but quotes.) Clinton was never very good on the saxophone, but he plays audiences like no one else around, and he had a great theme: the campaign was not going to be about "who’s a good man and who’s a bad man," but about "choices." He kept stressing that the Republicans sincerely believe what they profess to believe, and that citizens who felt the same way (after Clinton had shown them how disastrously wrong they were) should go ahead and do so. So though his energy was high and his pace brisk, he seemed like sweet reason itself.

Whether any of this will work is for greater minds than mine to puzzle out.

CALL ME CRAZY. If we don't like Bush, suggests Virginia Postrel, it's just because we're mentally unbalanced:

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, a friend in the magazine business told me he thinks the ferocious Bush hating that he sees in New York is a way of calming the haters' fears of terrorism. It's not rational, but it's psychologically plausible -- blame the cause you can control, at least indirectly through elections, rather than the threats you have no control over.

Actually, Madame Dynamist, we expect to address, electorally, the cause we can control of a whole host of national ills. Thankfully -- and as a libertarian I'm sure you can appreciate this -- the franchise extends even to those of us who irrationally choose to live in New York, rather than (shudder) Dallas.

AN ORNAMENT TO OUR NATIONAL DEBATE:

NO WONDER THEY'RE ALL LIBERALS [Kate O'Beirne]
The delegates, politicians, consultants and hangers-on all know that there's such a thing as a free lunch--and breakfast and cocktails and dinners and late-night parties. They all stop milling around hotel lobbies every few hours to partake of all the free eats. While other hotel guests are in the restaurants talking with friends, I am the only one ordering food. Sure, GOP delegates will also enjoy lots of freebies, but at least they'll go back to working in the private sector when the convention ends. When the Democrats aren't feeding their delegates, the taxpayers are.
Posted at 02:26 PM

Nice to see the "truth squad" out there digging! Coming up: high volume of toilet flushes in Boston prove Democrats shit on America!

REDSTATE: NEW, KID-FRIENDLY FORMULA. When Redstate started out it was pretty wonkish, mostly featuring brain-busters such as this one by Paul J. Cella:

Modern Liberalism is our orthodoxy... the terrible conundrum for many on the Right is that the new orthodoxy is repugnant to them -- opposed, in fact, to the nature of man, which it is their orthodoxy to hold up to men as true, irrevocable. So Conservatives, under this new orthodoxy, cannot be conservative; indeed, the day may dawn when they will be revolutionaries. Yet some will remain mere conservatives, and turn with loathing on what they see in their former comrades as a new threat to the established order which it is their business to defend...

And if Hawkman teamed up with The Atom, they could totally take The Spectre and The Green Arrow.

But now it seems Tacitus and the guys have been through the focus groups and the blue-sky sessions, and are dumbing it down. Today at Redstate we find a Free Republic-style "W is My Kinda Heterosexual" photo essay, the text of which ("Yes, George Bush likes women. He's surrounded himself with one of the finest, Condoleezza Rice... she is one of the President's MVPs -- and the media and the left can't forgive her for that. But not me. I like Condi -- I like Condi a lot") suggests Peggy Noonan without the hallucinogens.

There is also what appears to be the transcript of a closing argument by an underfunded high-school debate team:

In this fight, no man or woman can be neutral.

I want a leader who, when he hears the words, Nine Eleven, feels them in his gut.

Oh, brother. What was that old line about putting the grown-ups back in charge?

FIRST TIME AT THE BALLPARK, MR. CARNEY? Timothy P. Carney compares the Democrats to Red Sox fans and the Republicans to the Yankees team -- a crappy analogy which Carney says he doesn't want to "take too far" before pounding three feet into hard ground. He compares the Dems thus not because they, like the Bostonians, have learned wisdom from long endurance of unjust defeats, but because they are (new Republican buzzword!) haters. As the Bostonians "find it more natural to hate the Yankees than to love the Sox," he says, so the Democrats are more about hating Bush than about loving Kerry.

First of all, John Kerry is not the Boston Red Sox. At best, Kerry is Terry Francona. (The Yankees/Republican analogy is slightly more apt -- both entities are awash in money; both are run by boorish, half-mad Nixonian tyrants; and in both cases, they get their strongest support from people who know the least about the game.)

The Bostonians' hatred of the loathsome Yankees is well-known, and seconded by all right-thinking people. But how does seething at one's enemies mean that you don't love your team? Carney offers as evidence the chant of "YANKEES SUCK" with which they responded to Bill Mueller's game-winning homer on Saturday. Perhaps he thinks the hardscrabble sons of a hardscrabble city should have thrown confetti and yelled, "GEE WHIZ, WE SURE DO LOVE OUR GREAT GUYS THE RED SOX, AND WE MEAN THAT IN A NON-SEXUAL WAY!" or whatever they do in the Montana Farm League.

Things are a little quieter now but time was, whenever the Phillies played at Shea, security had to be stepped up to quell the inevitable, Amtrak-enabled fistfights in the stands. The "YANKEES SUCK" chant has been heard at Shea, too. I suppose Carney might say that Mets fans have been "driven to insanity" by the Yankees, though I would not suggest that he say that anywhere near Flushing Meadow.

Come to think of it, I have heard (and been party to, and with good reason) booing of the Mets at Shea. Maybe we hate ourselves!

And maybe Carney should leave the baseball analogies to Ron Shelton.

ARTS ROUNDUP. A fellow named Daniel Fuchs wrote a book called Summer in Williamsburg back in the 30s. The novel, and its sequelae, didn't sell. Fuchs went on to write screenplays (including Love Me or Leave Me) and got rich.

Summer in Williamsburg isn't great, and suffers a good deal by comparison to that other New York Jewish proletarian novel of the time, Call It Sleep, but it's a fun read, especially (at least at first) if you live in Williamsburg. It touches on all the fashionable themes of its era -- the roiling misery and foolishness of the slums, race hatred, the weary arguments of capitalism and socialism, and some very specific intellectual pretensions of the day, to illumine which Fuchs uses a bohemian but untalented and neurotic young man named Cohen, and a girlfriend of the mensch protagonist who goes to ethnicified "modern dance" recitals and such like.

Fuchs apparently finds all this the bunk, which explains why he went on to write screenplays, and why the novel gets wearisome after a while. He even writes things like "High up, a million miles into the sky, God sits on a big cloud. He looks absent-mindedly about... now he peers down for a moment, His gaze rests on Williamsburg..." (This reminds me of a story Bennett Cerf used to tell about a cub reporter who found himself in Johnstown during the great Flood. He wired his lede to his editor -- "God sits looking down on a desolate Johnstown tonight..." -- and the editor wired back, "OK forget flood, interview God, rush pictures.")

But still it's nice to see old South 2nd Street and Merserole and the Bridge Plaza rendered, however romantically, in the days when penny candy really was a penny and people were called names like Natie the Buller.

Saw Night of the Iguana on TV. It's not first-rate Williams, but it sings in its own morbidly poetic way (his stories have a way of sucking you in once you stop gagging on the froth). And who can imagine a self-consciously lyrical text like this being made into a Hollywood A-picture, with stars the like of Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr, today? Camera tricks aside, it makes David Lynch look like Jerry Bruckheimer.

TELLING DETAIL. It's a small thing, I know, but often the devil is in the details, in this case literally so:

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT! "Dems bar Nader from Convention."

"More crushing of dissent" is of course the Ole Perfesser's way of making a funny (often with the appendage "in Ashcroft's America") when someone identified with the Left cracks down on someone's speech.

Those not nuts will realize that Ralph Nader is running against John Kerry and has no Constitutional right to attend his opponent's private function.

The responsible thing would be to trawl through the Perfesser's old posts and see which other ones are total crap. But in the immortal words of Hemingway (speaking, I believe, of the work of James Jones, to which he had been accused of paying insufficient attention), I do not need to eat a bucket of shit to know that it is shit.

SHORTER WILLIAM BENNETT. How dare you Democrats campaign vigorously against a sitting Republican President! That's not the Democratic Party I abandoned.

(Also, Preacher Bennett seems not to realize that Germany and Japan were allies in the Second World War, which is how Pearl Harbor got us at war with Hitler; it was not, as the Preacher suggests, an early version of Bush's "As long as we're all pissed off, why not invade another country?" strategy.)

PROFESSIONAL COURTESY. Tbogg reproduces some long, long paragraphs of godawful crap by this frother. I tunneled through it, wondering if anything T could stick at the end would make it worth the struggle. And there it was:

Kind of makes you wish you couldn't read English, doesn't it?

And with one light, deft smack the lumbering prose of Mr. van der Leun goes into a ditch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is style.

GOP OMG. Throw ya guns in the air like you just don't care! The 2004 "Stand Up and Holla!" competition for GOP youfs is in full effect.

Finalist Reza say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? King Kong: I’ve always wanted to hang off of the Empire State Building with a beautiful woman in my arms. Swing her upside-down, bro -- no abortion discussion necessary if you bust a nut in her mouth!

Finalist Adam say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? The best show to ever hit Broadway is “A Raisin in the Sun.” It captures all that is good and bad about America and the power of the American dream. Step off, Adam! Don't you know all commie Langston-Hughes related joints is straight-up wack?

Finalist Prabel say:
“I voted for Prell to go back to the old glass bottle. Then I became deeply cynical” ... Homer Simpson encapsulates why presidents ranging from Kennedy to George W. Bush have called for more community service. Well, maybe Homer doesn't quite mirror the president's sentiments, but it's for Americans like Homer that community service is important... Mr. Goldberg votes for you to write his columns. They don't make sense, either!

Finalist Hans say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? West Side Story. We don't be hatin', but you can't get married, yo.

Finalist Clarence say:
What's your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie?
The 1990s musical Newsies features a scene where a group of boys, angry at the way they were being treated, stand up to a newspaper giant in the streets of NYC. This scene shows that NYC represents the heart and soul of America -- a land where everyone has the opportunity to succeed because of the free society we have been blessed with. See Hans.

Finalist Nathan say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? What comes to mind first is a childhood favorite, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I was about 8 years old when this movie came out and I remember thinking how cool it would be to live as Macaulay Culkin did in a suite at The Plaza Hotel, with an unlimited budget for room service. Damn, Nate -- you's a GOP-dawg fashizzle!

STOP THE PRESSES! OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger doesn't like Fahrenheit 911. Among his complaints:

Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.

Not like the "liberal media" coverage of the war itself, where we got lots of up-close-and-personal interviews with bombed Iraqis. And:

Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate.

Henninger obviously wants a fiction film with sparkling urbanites discussing the art of love. Can someone give him the number for Moviefone?

Coming next week: how Citizen Kane unfairly maligns wealthy press magnates!

REAL TERRORISTS. The Syrian 'hijackers' who freaked out Annie Jacobsen so badly turn out to have been, as they claimed, just a band flying not to Jihadi Paradise but to a gig:

On Monday, a Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman, Dave Adams, said that the suspicious characters on Flight 327 were musicians. The man in the yellow shirt was a drummer, he said. "We interviewed all 14 of these individuals," Adams said. "They were members of a Syrian band" traveling to a gig at a casino near Los Angeles, he said, adding that their names were run through "every possible" data bank and terrorist watch list. "They were scrubbed. Nothing came back."

Annie Jacobsen isn't convinced. I asked her about the inevitable charge that ethnic stereotyping was driving her narrative. "I am simply not a racist," she said. "I travel everywhere. This situation was entirely different. I have never been so terrified."

That's interesting: "Jacobsen isn't convinced." I understand her mistrustfulness; I feel the same way about her.

I CRY THEE MERCY THEN, FOR I HAD THOUGHT/THAT THOU HADST CALLED ME ALL THESE BITTER NAMES. Some time back, Meryl Streep told the press that to prepare for the evil political mom in The Manchurian Candidate, she watched tapes of Karen Hughes and our own Crazy Jesus Lady, Peggy Noonan.

Catching wind of this, rightwing operatives from the backwoods of Tennessee to the closets of Los Angeles to the lowliest Internet tide-pools came out to insist that Streep was playing Hillary Clinton. Some normally astute people got fooled as badly by this disinformation as did the usual retards.

When operatives were reminded in public forums of Streep's comments, they said Streep was actually wrong about herself, or just pretended not to hear.

The masterpiece of the mobilization is in today's column by Streep's study subject herself, Peggy Noonan, in which she claims "People think the evil woman Meryl Streep plays in 'The Manchurian Candidate' is Hillary because, well, they've seen Hillary make a speech."

This is pure evil genius, friends, right up there with Richard III's turnaround on Margaret ("'Tis done by me, and ends in 'Margaret'"). If I didn't hate the bastards so much, I'd give 'em a golf clap.