NOW, BACK TO THE IMPORTANT SUBJECTS. Xan Brooks is amusing, and onto something, concerning the new Vanity Fair cover:

...therein lies the problem with this Vanity Fair fleshpot. It is neither arousing enough to sate the masturbators, nor artistic enough to appeal to the aesthetes.

As a masturbator and an aesthete, I say hear, hear! I was eager, not to say anxious, to get a load of Scarlett Johansson naked, if only to establish a more vivid mise en scene for that play I've had running in my head since I was 13, Even Though I'm A Beautiful Movie Star I Can't Keep My Hands Off Roy Edroso. (The production has undergone some changes over the years -- when it opened it was a wispy, sensitive bildungsromance, but now it has more of a Bukowski feel, and certainly more cursing -- and some of America's top starlets have done their best work in the lead role.)

Alas, Ms. Johansson appears to have been made up for the shoot with pastry flour, and to be posing for a Hummel figurine. That such a beautiful woman, unclothed yet, could be made to look unsexy! Now I'll have to recast Even Though I'm A Movie Star... with one of those women I brush up against on the subway.

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE'RE ALL NOT THINKING! I rool. While other blogs just yapped, growled, and heh-indeeded about Mohammedian censorship, I gave the cartoonophobes something to jihad about.

Yet thanks to their Good Old Blog network connections, those fake freedom fighters still get all the attention, while I labor here in obscurity -- probably a good thing, as my fatwa has come through: "Oh, a wise guy?" wrote one Latrell X in a note that came covered in white powder (which our lab has determined to be Desenex); "Why, I oughta..." Here the note ominously trails off.

Ah well; this story, like all blogospheric proclamations of Clash of Civ endtimes, will not last long. Soon the self-soothing that'll-show-those-Europeans gurglings will lull their authors into the next news cycle, which I understand is all about tapping phone calls made between the U.S. and Batavia, New York.

But there is no soothing (self- or otherwise) our old friend Twelve-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, who, while giving the back of his hand to maniacal Muslims, plants his bayonet in the belly of the real beast -- European godlessness!

The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons last September was not standing up courageously for freedom of expression. The editors and cartoonists were so oblivious to any reality beyond their Copenhagen coffee bars that they just thought they were pulling an attention-getting prank.

They got attention, all right. As did the papers elsewhere in Europe that reprinted the offending cartoons last week. In the name of press freedom, of course.

The problem is that with freedom comes responsibility, a quality to which Europe's become allergic (nothing is ever a European's fault). Breaking a well-known taboo of Islam was irresponsible. No other word for it.

One of the things we love about the General is his tendency to sprint -- usually naked, frothing, and waving his pearl-handled pistol -- off the reservation: while the Malkins of the world have to make believe (thanks, I believe, to some ancient treaty with the glibertarians) that they care about freedom and stuff, the General just hears the word "Yurrup" and visions of limp-wristed espresso-drinkers start bonking around inside his helmet.

And you know what his problem with these here Yurrupeans is? Not just that they're a little light in the Birkenstocks -- but that they ain't got God ("Today's Europeans consider religious belief as beneath their sophistication"). And without God, you can't have the sort of war the General's been practicing his whole life for: a total, orgiastic, scimitar-versus-bunkerbuster, real rain that'll wash all the scum off the streets.

This is partly why, after a long fun run with the General, I don't quote him so much anymore. He has no agenda other than his own madness, while the usual targets of our wrath are more calculating and dishonest. You will see their freedom flags dip, as their "Support Denmark" flags have already started to do, once we go back to talking about American citizens again. The General, bless him, never shifts tactics.

UPDATE. If you get tired of brainless wreckers like me, one of the very, very few intelligent discussions of this subject is at Sisyphus Shrugged.

THE RETURN OF MICHAEL TOTTEN'S "PROTEST BABES"! The Cedar Revolution continues! I swear to you, there are a couple of real lookers just out of frame here:



OK, I'm kidding. Totten doesn't like Lebanese riots over those Danish Mohammed cartoons and neither do it. In fact, I dislike them so much that I will show solidarity with the forces of free speech by publishing in this very blog my own cartoon of Mohammed waving "hi" to his fans:



I am told it was the bare fact of the Prophet's pictoral representation that stirred the Islamic nuts' wrath, so it should not matter that my Mohammed is not doing anything sinister (or that I can't draw hands, or much of anything else) -- I am one with my Danish comrades in breaking a taboo. That makes me "politically incorrect," the highest accolade in the rightwing vocabulary. God, I feel brave -- every bit as brave as a Fightin' Keyboarder mouthing off about Brokeback Mountain!

I invite these idiots to stop blaming the cartoon controversy on liberal professors, and to cheer my courage. And -- using their own infallible logic -- if they fail to do so, it proves they are objectively pro-censorship!

This blog thing is ever so much more fun than the real world. P.S. Censorship sucks. Just mentioning it on the very odd chance that you didn't realize that's what we all think.

UPDATE. Readers are not impressed with my blasphemy. "I would not give even a paper cut to your neck," writes Mr. I. Kabibble. "Your death can wait until the coming holocaust." So I have upped the ante by amending my drawing so that it shows Mohammed smoking a cigarette:



I also decided that his hand is turned in that bizarre way because he is dancing, which I'm sure must be very offensive. I probably won't make it to nightfall! Give my love to the Danes, especially Claire.

UPDATE 2. Hey, apparently I love freedom more than Condi "for President" Rice. This encourages me to kick it up a notch: Since, hours after my original entry, I have not received any credible death threats, I will try acting all Danish to see if that's the "X" factor in this case.

How does one act all Danish? I dunno, but aren't they almost the same thing as Swedish? I'm just do my John Qualen impression: Heurney fleurny heurney! Heurney fleurny heurney! Oh, Ethan -- Mohammed's he don't a-smell too good, py Yimminy! Heurney fleurny!

UPDATE 3. Nothing from the Islamofascists, but I did hear from one guy who claimed he was going to replace all my furniture with plain, blond wood modular units.

Stephen Green fantasizes that Hollywood will help him make fun of Muslims. Of course, Green makes fun of Hollywood at the same time, so there is little chance that "the writing staff of Will & Grace" will be rushing to join his jihad anytime soon. So he's stuck with Citizen Satirists like me! C'mon, Steve, let's see if we can't git-r-done:



Hyuk hyuk. "Mr. Egyptian, yer a goddamn liar!" We don't need us no arty-farties nohow. Hell, we can animate this and put it in the Liberty Film Festival!

Whoops, here come my assassins. Gotta run!

DUMP YOUR PAJAMAS MEDIA STOCK! I'm no kind of financial reporter, but I do notice the Ole Perfesser pitching to Craigslist:

Perhaps Craigslist should consider a local-franchise model that would incorporate local news content, something that -- as far as I know -- they're not doing. That would still kill off a lot of local weeklies that are nothing but vehicles for classified ads now, but so what? They're doomed anyway. At least it might add something.

Of course, when the Perfesser says "local-franchise model," it's like when he says "Libertarian" -- window-dressing to get the rubes on board for what he's actually selling. And that's the value-add we're all looking for in a classified-ad service: right-wing political bullshit. If this were a good idea, surely Buy-Lines would have picked up Ed Anger's column by now.

I haven't heretofore spoken to the issue of Pajamas Media because why would I: it's a bunch of crappy writers ganged up to exponentiate their crappiness. Their claim to fame is that they're all pioneers in one of the Century's first big fads -- as if there were some merit in being the new Shipwreck Kelly. Smart guys like the Perfesser are hedging their bets by exploiting their notoriety to sell old-fashioned dead-tree products; others will be absorbed into the Republican journalism machine; most, alas, will wind up haunting gin mills and blind tigers, occasionally puffing out their chests and crying Don't you know who I am? Try Googling DeathtoLiberalsWI59, mortal!

Eventually I'm sure the franchise will be bought by Murdoch or Moon or some such, festooned with Page Six "protest babes," and trawled downmarket. Whether that will be counted a victory for blogism in general or PJM is particular, I neither know nor care; among the vanities, this doesn't even rank with the crackling of thorns under the pot.

Still, it is interesting to see the Perfesser pushing it at people like Craig Newmark, especially given what Newmark wrote on Wednesday:

PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM IS A BIG DEAL: Looks like I can't say this enough, since it's forgotten in both the excitement for citizen journalism and the stress of competition.

Professional journalism involves high standards of writing, fact checking, editing, and research.

Journalism ethics includes "separation of church and state", figuratively meaning that marketing and financial concerns are separate from editorial matters and reporting.

Professional news organizations recognize that we all have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting what news operations, etc., that serve the community best.

A special tip of the hat to the San Francisco Chronicle, which has greatly impressed me with its adherence to ethical standards. thanks!

High standards! Fact checking! Separation of church and state (even as a metaphor)! The doubleplusungood San Francisco Chronicle! Looks like a very bad fit for PJM.

Next stop: Maxim online, for whom the Perfesser can review gadgets.

NOW HERE'S A MAKEOVER I CAN GET BEHIND. From the Washington Post today:

Maybe Will prayed, "Give me lips, God -- I don't care what it takes!"

SHORTER JEFF GOLDSTEIN: You pathetic liberal jerks, I was joking when I said cuff Sheehan to a radiator! You just can't perceive my strenuous and sophisticated humor, you stupid -- hey! I said I was joking! You must have very tight assholes because you are not laughing at my jokes, idiots! Etc.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I am tired of being a wall-flower. I go to be young with the young! Everybody: The Democrats are unhinged! The Dem-- what's that? You need proof of my loyalty? I must denounce Wendy Wasserstein? B-but wait -- I can imply she was right-wing, then there'll be no need... Oh. I'm sorry, comrade: yes, I meant prove she was right-wing.

EASY MONEY. As we have previously observed, conservative culture cops have gotten comfy reviewing films they haven't even seen, so why shouldn't National Review's John J. Miller pick up an easy extra buck at OpinionJournal reviewing the unreleased Curious George movie?

He actually does okay for a while, poking around the famed monkey's biographical data, but Miller knows he has to get to the right-wing money shot sometime, so about halfway down he tells us that "the first book (Curious George) violates our modern codes of political correctness," implying that the film, being a product of Hollyweird, has corrrr-rected that. And those trained to heed the PC dog-whistle lean forward, expecting news of some absurd liberal whitewash.

But Miller reports that, based on his close reading of the movie's trailer, while the original Man in the Yellow Hat was "a gun-toting poacher" who kidnapped George from his African home, he is now "an unarmed naturalist." Also, movie George does not smoke and drink, as did first-book George.

At this point even conservative parents are probably scratching their heads, thinking, Gee, we hates us some goddamn librul PC, but do we really want little Ayn and Whittaker to admire poachers and a cute little monkey who smokes and drinks? It is a children's movie, after all.

"Perhaps these revisions are an acceptable bowdlerization," admits Miller. Realizing with horror that he has hundreds of words to go, he casts about for ways to hurl George at liberal heads. The best he can do is, "Today's Hollywood probably would be more comfortable making the Man in the Yellow Hat an out-and-proud homosexual than an exploiter of the animal kingdom," before concluding that Hollywood shouldn't fool around too much with the classics. How I wish I could show this garbage to the ghosts of Hazlitt and Dryden, and then, after they had stopped whirling and asking God why they had been flung into Hell, arm them with billy clubs (or, failing that, pen and ink), so they could express to Miller their feelings about the perversions he has performed on the art of criticism.

THE SLEEP OF REASON BREEDS BULLSHIT. It's fascinating to watch the birth of an idea, even a competely retarded one. In the American Spectator, Mark Gauvreau Judge posits such a thing as "metrocons," well-read conservatives who disdain rowdy entertainments such as muscle-car rallies.

Folks who share my unhealthy fascination with this sort of nonsense will recall that, in the 90s, Judge was pushing swing-dancing as a conservative credential, and when mass Lindy Hopping did not break out all across America, he retreated to the usual tired culture-war crap for his living, till this new, Gestaltifying idea came upon him.

His fellow derechos are not, so far, having it, to judge by these responses. But I give them no credit for that, because they argue against the metrocon idea for a variety of countervailing doctrinal and political reasons, rather than dismissing it outright as bullshit, or whatever word Father Neuhaus uses instead of "bullshit."

By bullshit I mean, in this instance, that the idea is produced, not by the logic of the true student of human nature, or even of the sociologist, but of the marketing consultant. Like the promoters of Crunchy and South Park variants of conservatism, Judge is just looking for an angle that will make his name in the psuedo-science of conservative taxonomy. It offers nothing to stimulate serious thinking or political action; it is the apotheosis of the old saw, "The personal is the political" -- an adage formulated years ago on the Left, but lately adopted whole-heartedly by the Right.

Judge's concept is not worth even such discussion as I have given it here, but it is genuinely interesting to see how far such useless ideas as his can get in the current environment; The New Criterion deigning to discuss metroconservatism is like the Pope issuing a Bull on the selection of American Idol winners.

We have all seen what happens to some people who enjoy great success without doing anything to merit it: very few of them can simply relax and enjoy their good fortune; they crack up their Ferraris, they descend into drug addiction, they take up Scientology or some other crackpot creed to explain to themselves that there is no giant foot trying to squash them. Conservatives got a big Lotto jackpot with the War on Terror, and have since been laying about the mansion, engaging in increasing dorm-like bull sessions, inventing ever more sophisticated sophistries -- shrinking government while their Congressmen and contributors plunder the Treasury, converting Arabs by blowing them up, and so forth.

Next I suppose they'll be inventing conservative haircuts and ways of wearing their breeches. And after that -- well, we all know how that goes.

SOTU WHAT? There's not much to say about tonight's State of the Union address. As President Bush sees it, there are no Constitutional concerns with the NSA, Gulf hurricane victims need school vouchers, and homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married. This we knew. As for the "addiction to foreign oil" bit, I am old enough to remember the promise of hydrogen cars in the 2003 SOTU, so I know it means nothing.

I might ask why the list of countries to which we will inevitably deliver democracy did not include Cuba, but what's the point? Apart from the grisly image of aged and infirm Coretta Scott King embracing MLK with his throat shot open, this speech had no literary substance whatever. Leave it for the dogs to pick over.

SITUATIONAL ETHICS PART 399,045. Hugh Hewitt finds a Democratic Congressional candidate who was mean to a Republican decorated veteran, and asks

Where are the Democrats who should be denouncing this? The ones who, rightly, slammed the comments directed at Congressman John Murtha's service?

Wow, I didn't know Hewitt was against those comments directed at John Murtha! And there's a good reason I didn't know it: because he said something entirely different at the time:

Every Democrat who attempted to charge the Republicans as attacking Congressman Murtha's patriotism was instantly revealed as a fraud...

The wolf is never so disgusting as when he's pretending to be Grandma.

SHORTER CULTURE-WAR NUTS: What! No nominations for Jesus? This is the most left-wing Oscars ever! Giving awards to small movies, rather than multi-million-dollar epics like Marty amd Chariots of Fire? Further proof of liberalism! Real people will boycott Oscars in favor of Justice Monday! Reese Witherspoon's inevitable Oscar is the exception that proves the movie-traitor rule! And that's the trouble with these artist-people -- they politicize everything!

THE POLITICIZATION OF EVERYTHING, PART 988,098: Michael Novak at The Corner:

GO STEELERS! So it's steeltown America on the rise, the rough and the ready, not a rich team but always fighting and always playing smash-mouth, and running hard, and slashing... and I love it that their opponents this year will be wearing the colors of --hard to comprehend this -- Hamas! Couldn't be a better opponent, who will probably be favored. .... Pittsburgh is the city of the Deerslayer, and the American flag, and always the highest casualty rates in American wars...

I guess it could be a joke, but at The Corner how does one tell? (I do smell bourbon, though. Oh wait, that's just me.)

I eagerly await responses from the objectively pro-Seahawks crowd.

UPDATE. Shortly thereafter: "K-Lo suggests that Kiefer Sutherland's win in the SAG awards might be a case of Hollywood finally catching up on the war on terror."

Anyone remember that old Peanuts strip where Violet bragged to Charlie Brown about her "new hi-fi bracelet," leaving CB to wonder, "How can a bracelet be hi-fi?" I think about that one a lot these days.

DONKEY LABOR. I blush to admit that tonight was the first time I had seen Au Hasard, Balthazar. I saw Bresson's L'Argent years ago, and never visited him again, but now I want to see all his movies. I understand this is a common reaction.

The story, such as it is, is probably familiar to you: a donkey's life, and the lives of the people around him, none of which go particularly well, but all of which are ennobled by the telling of the tale. I was amazed, after all these years, to recognize in Balthazar Bresson tropes from L'Argent: concentration on hands and legs, tears that appear without histrionic squeezing ("Don't mock my tears, Gerard"), and a benumbed performance style.

I had heard plenty about the Christian sensibility of the film, and it is unavoidable, but the donkey's role in the proceedings surely is not that of Christ, or at least not that of the exemplary Christ seen in most film treatments (to take the most noble example, Johannes in Ordet). Balthazar is beaten, persevering, and loyal, but his example neither teaches nor saves anyone. Even Anne, who loved him as a child, mostly ignores him after she has taken up with the silly moped gangsters. The drunkard is close in status to a mystic -- barefoot, misanthropic, prayerful, and given a second chance by a mysterious inheritance -- and at times he seems like the most natural companion to Balthazar, even in his superstitious cruelty toward him ("Satan! Jinx!"), but in the end merely falls, with a kind word, off Balthazar's back to his death.

What then makes Balthazar's presence so powerful in the film? Perhaps his necessity. Everyone needs Balthazar, to carry loads, to smuggle, to love (briefly), to perform in a circus, to draw well water. He is the ultimate supernumerary, suddenly and unexpectedly given his own storyline, and his prominence throws a new light on everyone around him. Everyone avails him, but only the audience sees Balthazar's importance, or cares about what happens to him, and only we (along with other beasts of the fields) are around to observe and mourn his passing. If Christ is in this picture, he is only in our reaction.

Balthazar reminds me in some ways of the subservient Schmurz in Vian's The Empire Builders -- but unlike the Schmurz, he does not come to collect his due at the end. (Maybe that would be Mel Gibson's Au Hasard, Balthazar.) He also reminds me, perhaps more appropriately, of Firs at the close of The Cherry Orchard. I think Chekhov wanted to create a moment there that would sharply and suddenly contrast the rich folks' struggle of vanities over the old and new orders, which comprises the rest of the play, with an earthier correlative: an old, enfeebled, abandoned retainer, lying down as if for a moment, but really for the last time, at the post. Maybe Bresson's insight was to build a whole work of art around that: the forgotten party, the "sound of a broken string," and the axes working in the background.

REPUBLICAN POPULISM AT WORK: "Though my sample size (about 30 people) and location (the small towns of Greensburg and Latrobe) were hardly scientific, I think my results were broadly representative of working-class Americans." -- Mark Stricherz

(In case you were wondering, Stricherz' working class thinks abortion is infanticide and has no truck whatsoever with "feminist terms about autonomy, privacy, and rights.")

You see a lot of this sort of thing nowadays: conservatives who, so far as I know, do not themselves labor as stevedores or bare-knuckle boxers, explaining that liberals know nothing about the real people. I am tempted to bring up my own long career in menial jobs, but who would believe me? No one who ever swept floors could believe the cuh-razy things I believe.

HANG ONTO YOURSELF. I watched Boston Legal this week. Most weeks I catch at least a little of it. It's a horrible, horrible show, the apotheosis of David E. Kelley's lurid vision of professional life as an endless series of jacked-up and frequently absurd job crises, the tension of which is inevitably relieved by sexual intrigue (also in an endless series, and jacked-up, and frequently absurd). Most of the players are attractive young people who can barely get their chiseled jaws around the preposterous dialogue.

But Boston Legal stars James Spader and William Shatner, and they make a fascinating spectacle in this shabby little arena. From the beginning, they have seemed to inhabit a different universe from all the other characters. They float through their scenes like 19th-century royals after a good lunch at Maxim's, self-satisfied and serene. They are dimly aware of the other characters' needs and desires, and sometimes are inclined to indulge them for reasons of appetite similar to those that animate the other characters -- professional honor or glory, morality, and sex. But where the other performers sweat this stuff, granting it as much importance as I believe the audience is meant to, Spader and Shatner feel the pangs of motivation as one might feel an urge to scratch or stretch, and react to them with refreshing naturalness and self-possession.

This makes them stand out, and reveals a mystery of the performer's art. Acting is a cooperative venture; even monologuists must engage the camera or the audience, while most players also have to evidence relationships with other players. So the actor has to concentrate on people as well as lines, blocking, and the director's orchestration. Maintaining this divided consciousness is a key part of the job, and when an actor says "I really felt it tonight," he is (usually without noticing) celebrating the fact that he felt it while doing everything else he had to do. (Interestingly, Pauline Kael relates that Orson Welles had just this sort of epiphany, which seems to have been rare for him, during the solo in Citizen Kane in which he wordlessly smashes up a room.)

Good actors can handle all that, but great ones know that there is another focus of concentration that needs to be maintained: the concentration on oneself as a character. The famous hams, of course, concentrate on themselves, period, which is actually almost as good. I thought of this while watching John O'Hurley -- yes, Peterman! -- play Billy Flynn recently in Chicago. He wasn't quite what I had in mind, and his schtick usually tires me, but he seemed so perfectly comfortable with himself and his "That's right, Elaine, the white lady -- yam-yam!" readings that he made me comfortable, too, and pulled me over my general objections.

This is why stunt casting is seldom totally disastrous: assuming the player has not lost the nerve that made him or her a celebrity, that boldness in self-presentation will read from the cheap seats as well as a journeyman actor's conscientious characterization.

(This self-regard is not the same thing, of course, as self-consciousness; self-consciousness will make even a great spirit awkward; the self-regarding man could walk into a scene covered with shit and, after perhaps a brief word of explanation for the stench -- offered for your benefit, not his -- go on as if nothing untoward had happened.)

I think Spader and Shatner have a little more on the ball than O'Hurley, but while their characters have a few shades to them, it is their extreme comfort with themselves that makes them galvanic. The relative slightness of their interest in other people is perhaps a little hammy, but certainly not offensive -- if you were this fascinating person, wouldn't you be more interested in yourself, too?

That Spader and Shatner have one another to re-enforce this routine just exponentiates the effect; I especially enjoy the coda of each show, where they sit out on the balcony with drinks and cigars and stare out onto the skyline while talking out their days -- parallel egos taking a moment to take mutual pleasure in their singularities.

For further reference, see Jose Ferrer in Enter Laughing, or Errol Flynn in anything. But I'm sure you can think of other examples.

THE RIGHT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "...my appetite for fisking has abated; it feels like angry break-up sex, and I don’t quite see the point much anymore." -- Jim Lileks. In the words of Curly: Nggggyaahhh. I wonder if the angry, fisky sex Lileks recalls was with this girl, and if that's what he meant by "end hard"? Time to check The Smoking Gun for old police reports.

WONKETTE HAS BEEN HACKED. Just a heads-up. Apparently someone's trying to show us just how unsexy and unfunny real nerds can be. As if we needed reminding!

UPDATE. The unfun and unsexy continues. You can always judge a man by his 70's rant. If it's all breakdown-of-society stuff, with no appreciation for the rampant drug abuse and unprotected anal sex, then it's time to move on to the next party.

THESE THINGS JUST WRITE THEMSELVES. Jonah Goldberg:

Kayne West's Jesus schtick is intended to buy some controversy. He's posing as Jesus for Rolling Stone. I really hope the religious right doesn't take the bait...

Jonah Goldberg, who I guess is not religious, forty minutes later:

A reader makes a good suggestion. If a rock or rap star wants to make waves in an interesting and novel way rather than this clichéd Jesus rip-off, they could always dress up like Muhammed. I don't support it, but that at least would take some guts.

Hey, that's a funny idea. Maybe Goldberg should do it. Oh, wait, his family couldn't afford the lost income etc.

Three minutes later, Tim Graham:

There is a media-bias connection to the Kanye West outrage.

Linked story cites Matt Lauer's outrage in 1997 over a National Review cover showing Clintons as buck-toothed Mistah Magloo Asians. Lauer's outrage makes it hypocritical for Rolling Stone (of which Matt Lauer was once editor-in-chief, right before Howell Raines and Michael Moore) to show a black man wearing a crown of thorns, is the point I'm guessing Graham wants to make. Or maybe there's another explanation -- like psilocybin:

Rolling Stone’s theology is interesting: they’re tongue-in-cheek about Jesus and genuflect under the ashes of dope fiend Hunter S. Thompson.

Graham's also pissed that West says he gets turned on by porn instead of by Canadian elections like normal people.

Meanwhile the publicity for Kanye West spreads like cooties in a junior-high locker room. Advantage: blogosphere! Or hiphoposphere! Or bullshitosphere! Or something, anyway, other than common sense.

UPDATE. It hadda happen! The Ole Perfesser does his bit for the Kanye media blitz; takes time to "yawn," link to Goldberg. What's Roc-A-Fella paying these people?

I'M A STUPID MORON WITH AN UGLY FACE AND A BIG BUTT AND MY BUTT SMELLS AND I LIKE TO SMELL MY OWN BUTT. Jonah Goldberg offers a list of books from a liberal POV "that I personally found interesting or useful." What makes such books interesting or useful to him?

There are certain things you need to look for when measuring the honesty of liberals writing about certain periods. For the Progressive era, they need to admit that civil liberties often mattered very little to the champions of "reform." When it comes to the New Deal, they need to acknowledge that on the specific terms used to justify the New Deal — i.e. ending the Great Depression — the New Deal was a failure (the best recent conservative book on this point is Jim Powell's FDR's Folly). Moreover, they need to acknowledge FDR's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft. I'm not saying that you have to think FDR was a lying dullard, or that the New Deal was a bad thing, to be an honest historian of the period, but you have to deal with those allegations thoughtfully.

As for the 1960s, you have to admit that at least some of the rebellion was little better than a pose; that fear of Vietnam and not high-minded pacifism was a major motive for the protest movement; and that some of the participants in the 1960s were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Similarly, I find conservative books most honest when they acknowledge Reagan's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft, and his failure on the specific terms of the Reagan Revolution -- i.e., to get the government off our backs (though if you think Reagan's purpose was to allow corporations to raid the Treasury, you would be honest in calling Reagan a success).

Also, you would need to admit that at least some of the Gingrich Revolution was little better than a pose; that enthusiasm for a new scam for disentangling suckers from their loot, and not high-minded government reform, was a major motive for the Contract with America; and that some of the participants in the Revolution were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Such books exist, but the conservatives who write them are usually called liberals.