MUCH, MUCH, MUCH, MUCH, MUCH SHORTER JEFF GOLDSTEIN: Sure glad I didn't make the mistake of attending Harvard!

DVD PARTY TONIGHT. Secretary. I’m always up for a good D/s love story, and while this is no Duel in the Sun, it does have spanking and modified pony girl action. I’d be inclined to leave it at that, but the filmmakers aren’t, so there are fantasy sequences, exotic set decoration, and a backstory of self-mutilation and familial and romantic disappointment to provide an explanation for folks who don’t get it. I understand the perceived necessity, but I sort of wish they’d just gone for it – particularly as James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal make the elemental situation entirely clear all by themselves. Of course, I also think someone should make a Bukowski movie that’s exactly like a crappy 70s porno with Bukowski dialogue. Or a film version of Albert Goldman’s Elvis: The Last 24 Hours, done in real time.

The Aristocrats. The pride-of-craft angle has been well-noted, and it’s fascinating to watch comedians, who for the most part are philosophical without being particularly thoughtful, rabbinically parse this ancient gag. (George Carlin is both philosophical and thoughtful. My favorite of his observations is, "Shock is just an uptown word for surprise.") The unspoken subtext here is the bottomless hostility of the professional comic. Though full of sexual activity, the eponymous joke is not the least bit sexy, but it is assaultive, and when rendered with Gilbert Gottfried energy it, as they say, kills. The famous and lucky comedians are cute enough about it, but the second-stringers, hollow-eyed and reeking of ancient flop-sweat, linger in my memory. Despite his celebrity, I would number among these Bob Saget. His nearly affectless telling of the joke seems almost like a confession, evoked by the pressure of long-buried shame.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE. Cliff May:

In a conventional war, if one side has tanks, fighter jets, submarines and similar weapons, while the other side does not, who wins? The answer is obvious.

In an unconventional war, if one side has suicide bombers, license to kidnap, torture and violate the laws of war while the other side must refrain from deploying such weapons and abide by all the rules, who wins? The answer, I'm afraid, may be equally obvious.

Beavis and Butthead:

BUTTHEAD: Axl Rose versus a blade of grass.

BEAVIS: Well, I dunno. I mean, if Axl was real quiet and snuck up on the blade of grass...

BUTTHEAD: It'd still kick his ass.

MORE INTELLECTUAL MUSCLE-FLEXING AT THE CORNER. Jonah Goldberg:

IS IT ME? Or is Norman Mailer really, really overrated? I've always felt guilty for not having read more of him, but I've had to read the White Negro, his write-up of the Rumble in the Jungle and a couple other things. For research, I'm just now reading Superman Comes to the Supermarket and I find it awfully tedious and astoundingly pretentious.

It's you, Jonah.

People who know how to read are directed to The Executioner's Song, The Armies of the Night, Why Are We In Vietnam? Miami and The Siege of Chicago, etc.

UPDATE. I am sorry to be reminded that Terry Teachout doesn't much like Mailer, either. (Goldberg seems to feel justified that a smart guy once came to a conclusion similar to his uninformed own, and by now has probably turned his attention to his tea-time McFlurry.) As an actual critic, Teachout is admirably specific about what bugs him in Mailer. A lot of what Teachout disdains, though, is actually what I admire; "romantic radicalism rooted in sexual mysticism" -- why, he could be talking about late Dreiser!

And Lord knows I'll take a writer "drunk on ideas" over the relative teetotalers at The Corner. That's the best defense of the old man I have to offer at present, through when Mailer passes I will probably fill several cocktail napkins on the subject. I will only add that, even if you think Mailer wrote one or two good novels and that everything else he did is shit, he has given us more than we are entitled to, and more than most can hope to achieve.

STILL MORE BLESSED RELIEF. A spruce piece of work by Doghouse Riley which, while here submitted for its formal excellencies*, does have its component of anger toward a scumbag utility boss and a rotten, inhuman system, so you may say we are getting slowly back to the social and political subjects that have made alicublog a cause for blinking unrecognition across our nation.

* Nabokov, when he taught Bleak House, would read to his classes the heartbreaking scene of Jo's death ("Dead, your Majesty...And dying thus around us every day"), and immediately afterwards remind the sniffling students, "This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion."

BLESSED RELIEF. It seems everywhere I look on the internet today, I find new nadirs of imbecility. To dispel the sensation of choking on my own bile, I refocused on something perceptive, well-written, and beyond politics: Terry Teachout on the Venn diagram of being a musician and being a writer. On a more childish level, this guy is hilarious (hat tip to Treacher, of all people). Give either a look if you too could use a break from the numbing fusillades.

If not, come back later and I'll be swearing at retards again.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT: Let's see if we can't get some poor saps to live in the cowtowns and make yummy food so us smart guys in the city can eat it. Oooh, that's crunchy!

(BTW I love, love, love the part about how Jesus didn't mean all rich people had to give up their possessions to follow him -- just that one poor sap! Maybe they should change the movement's name to You Go First Conservatism.)

I FIND IT HELPS SOMETIMES TO SPEAK TO THEM VERY SLOWLY AND DISTINCTLY. Tim Graham:

I've seen Crash, but not Hustle and Flow, but doesn't it seem there's great disagreement between Terence Howard's roles? In one, he's a slick Hollywood producer, disappointed that white boss Tony Danza makes him dumb down the black character in his sitcom. And in the other, he's a pimp trying to become a rapper trying to rhyme about "hos" instead of exploiting them.

It's... called.... act-ing... you... ass... clown.

SPEAKING OF IDIOTS. At the Crunchy Con site:

Homer Simpson is crunchy... Homer Simpson is emblematic of a large swath of America that still practices the conservative virtues Kirk touted as best they can in the midst of a culture and system that inherently handicaps those virtues.

Then:

Homer Simpson is NOT crunchy. He is the writers' stand-in for a crunchy, existing solely to be used to ridicule anyone with even the slightest conservatism in his life and values!... Want to find a good crunchy con? It's much more likely to be Ned Flanders — that's right, Ned, "okely-dokely" Flanders. A truly devout religious man, devoted to (deceased) wife, and family, running his own business.

One thing you have to give Janet Reno: she would have incinerated these morons days ago.

UPDATE. Jesus fucking Christ: "But oh-man-oh-man-oshevitz is Caleb off his rocker on this one. Bruce is right in so many ways. Homer is a consumerist qua consumerist..." Along with his other lazy columns about the Crunchy Cons, this is proof that Goldberg could defend 2+2=4 and wind up losing the argument.

SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS. John Podhoretz steers suckers to the Ole Perfesser's tent:

IT'S only March, but I can guarantee you there won't be a more exciting or inspiring book published this year than "An Army of Davids"...

Reynolds is so excited by the empowerment of the individual that he connects the technological improvements offered by the computer to the technological improvement of humanity. The advancement of knowledge means that in the next 30 years, we will be better and stronger and smarter due to the integration of high technology into our bodies and minds.

I'd say we could achieve the same end now, by replacing these guys' brains with coffee roasters.

"An Army of Davids" is infectiously optimistic. There are reasons to argue with its optimism, to mistrust Reynolds' always-look-on-the-bright-side-of life tone. But it's amazingly pleasant to read a provocative and thought-provoking book that doesn't say the present stinks and the future will be worse.

It's the feel-good hit of the slummer! Even rightwing blood-brotherhood doesn't explain this abject puffery, but that last paragraph might: as the conservative movement goes increasingly mad (to which spectacle Podhoretz recently had a front-row seat as an appalled spectator at Brother Dreher's Traveling CrunchyCon Show), these guys figure it might buy them a few more hours' grace in the control booth if they distribute happy shiny texts about how Garageband is going to start the Groovy Revolution.

Meanwhile this quote, from one Patrick Goldstein and circle-jerked by Ed Driscoll and the Perfesser, tells those of us who actually know how to read what's wrong with all this blogger-knows-best bullshit:

Even though the show ["American Idol"], for me, is little more than a tedious night at a karaoke bar, its contestants offering second-rate renditions of familiar pop fluff, it has captured the imagination of its young, largely female audience. They don't need any gray-bearded critics to tell them what they like — they prefer creating their own stars...

Our bottom-up culture puts little premium on subtle craft, not to mention expert opinion, whether it's Olympic judges or academy members. Young people want to be a member of a group, encouraged by their peers.

What's the opposite of elitism? Hint: it has to do with the elevation of the admittedly imbecilic over that stuff those stupid smart guys, with their expertise and their standards, say is "good." I mean, gray-bearded critics think this old black-and-white movie about this old dude who says "Rosebud" is better that Big Momma's House II. I mean, when they made the dude fat at the end, why didn't they made him black and a chick too? Guess they didn't have the technology. Losers.

I didn't like "Greed is Good," but "Crap is Good" is even worse.

POST-OSCAR RIGHT WING STYLEE: PAJAMAS MEDIA STRIKES BLECH! Let's see how the coolio conservatives responded to this year's Oscars:

Beginning to wonder how long it will take Jon Stewart to crack an anti-Bush joke.

[snip]

Waking up with George Clooney next to me would make it very easy for me to get out of bed.

[snip]

And so far, [Jon Stewart]'s making fun of Hollywood's devotion to the Democrats. So, I'll say good for him.

[snip]

"A return to glamour" is tonight's theme, says host John Stewart. Has he seen any of tonight's nominated movies? I know I haven't

[it was a joke, tanning-bed boy! snip!]

Clooney's award was payback for being robbed for his performance in "Return of the Killer Tomatoes["].

[snip]

YAY!! For March of the Penguins!!!!!! A well-deserved victory.

[snip]

J-Lo just spoke of forgiveness and resentment in a very angry tone: Which do you think she (and the Academy) really wants us to feel tonight?

[snip]

I love Sam Jackson, but hate it when Hollywood jerks itself off. Bo-ring.

[I should interject that there are intentional jokes embedded in this horseshit, in which right-wing bloggers pretend to be Hollywood celebrities making catty comments about the participants. Follow the link and prepare to laff ("prepare" meaning, in this case, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and get Gilbert Gottfried to read it to you). snip!]

Robert Altman is the most overrated director in Hollywood history. There, I said it. He's so beloved by actors because he over-indulges them.

[fuck you. I mean, snip]

Compare Witherspoon's speech to Julia Roberts's from a couple years back. The gal has class.

[snip]

Here's the statistical rundown: Crash, with a theatrical box office of $53 million, is the lowest-grossing Oscar winner since "The Last Emperor," going all the way back to 1987. And that's in non-inflation adjusted numbers. The average box office for all of this year's Best Picture nominees was the lowest since 1984. I believe history will mark this year as the beginning of the end for traditional, big-studio Hollywood. Of course, I could be wrong. Of course, some say that year transpired long ago.

[Very astute. And what might the sell-by date be for a combine of Republican bloggers playing at red carpet? snippety snip snap!]

If you really want to know how these people think, why not go straight to Free Republic ("Looks like Brokeback got rear ended") and be spared the pathetic attempt to be hip?

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART SIX. Stewart is funny still, but he has also sort of faded into the background – in other words, he’s an emcee, not a star galvanizing the event. Makes sense in an Oscar year of small Hollywood movies. Montage films, elaborate gags, nice moments in the acceptance speeches, and a brisk clip – why, you’d almost think they planned it this way.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY. I’m losing the pool, but I’m a traditionalist so I like that one movie is sweeping the craft awards.

BEST ACTRESS. First time I saw her was in Freeway. Then I saw Election. Then she made a lot of movies that I had no interest in seeing, though I peeked at them because she was in them. I thought she was wasting her talent, but I’m sure she was just taking such opportunities as arose to build her audience and her power. Her speech looks and sounds like pleasant treacle, but her comments about her family and her emphasis on T-Bone Burnett show some spine, taste, and wisdom. I haven’t seen this one yet, but I will now.

BEST ADAPTED SCRIPT: Larry McMurtry has a good gig. His dual academic/redneck cred makes it possible for him to resist all kinds of pressure in Hollywood. And he uses it well here. "All are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book." Hear, hear, cowboy.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY. Quoting Brecht? ‘Sokay, America went to bed already.

BEST DIRECTOR: I liked Crouching Tiger etc. Lee's tribute to "all the gay men and womens" is very sweet, partly for being rote. Not having seen The Hulk I don’t have a full read on his artistic personality, but I’ll go to the theatre next week and get more information. Hey, Oscar is doing his job!

BEST PICTURE. Whoa. Big coup! Newspapers full of Oscar ink! Was Oscar scared? Who is Paul Haggis? Is this picture The Greatest Show on Earth, Chariots of Fire, Driving Miss Daisy, or An American in Paris, In the Heat of the Night, All the King’s Men -- that is, a cop-out or a split decision? Again, you’d almost think they planned it.

Now time to clean up my own vomit! Thank you, get home safe!

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART FIVE. BEST SONG. "How come they’re the most excited people here tonight?" Because they think it’s the Grammys. We’ve come a long way from "Sweet Leilani."

BEST SOUND EDITING. Thanks, sound editors everywhere say, for giving us a novelty film.

DEAD GUY MONTAGE. Clooney was a good pick to intro – if he’s not the appropriate new Hollywood guy to bid adieu to the old, who is? I’m sorry there is apparently no one left to mourn, with applause, Moira Shearer and Teresa Wright, and that John Mills has to take runoff from Chris Penn. But hard workers in every industry die every day, and being applauded or mentioned or not, "handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

BEST FOREIGN FILM. I picked this one! It had commercials! I saw them on DVDs! It looked heart-rending!

BEST FILM EDITING. Which one had boxing? That was Cinderella Man, so I picked it in the pool… Crash? Was there boxing? I have to go to the movies more.

BEST ACTOR: Omigod, I just realized Hillary Swank has two Oscars. They came close together, not as close as Katharine Hepburn’s first two, but pretty close. Will she wait twenty-odd years for her third? Is the lack of good female roles in movies the modern equivalent of "box-office poison"? Halle Berry’s coming out with another X-Men movie, which will be crap. Laura Linney can’t catch a break casting-wise. I hear Philip Seymour Hoffman was pretty good in Capote.

UPDATE. I always make this mistake: Hepburn won her second Oscar thirty-three years after her first.

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.


BOMBAST MONTAGE. Jake Gyllegehuillahall says, "there’s no place to see them like on the big screen" and the audience pat their palms as if they don’t want to look too eager to drag us wretches into the cineplexes for their benefit. Then another Chuck Worman joint. Point taken, and thank Skerner God of Wood the Hollywoodians have King Kong and The Matrix to remind people that you can still have a good time stoned and watching things go kablooey, and you won’t even get ringworm by leaning your head back on the theatre seat.

BEST SOUND MIXING: You get the difference between this and Sound Editing, right? This is basically Best Sound. They split off Sound Effects Editing years ago because… fuck, I forget why. King Kong! I might win this pool if everyone else in my office had a bad hangover on Friday.

ROBERT ALTMAN! Holy fuck! Robert Altman! Even Streep and Tomlin doing a stupid bit about overlapping dialogue (Hello? Howard Hawks?) and improvisation (hello Cassavettes?) can’t fuck this up. Or can it? Shouldn’t they be smoking joints? Big, fat spliffs would have sewn up the urban youth demo. What a pleasure, though, to see him honored. But what’s the ornery old coot gonna say? "I thought this award meant it was over…" Then he tells what he’s up to. Then he tells about his next movie. "It’s not over." And "to me it’s just one long film." Well, yes, auteurist that I am, I cannot disagree. Nice analogy of the sand castle. "Have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away… I’ve built about forty of them…" And a nice "one more thing… eleven years ago I had a heart transplant… the heart of a young woman, I think in her late thirties… I think I’ve got about thirty years left." God, I hope so.

ROBERT ALTMAN CONT. What did Robert Altman do? Worked in almost every conceivable genre: detective story, gambling drama, service comedy, space movie, westerns, English murder mystery, L.A. murder mystery, musical, filmed theatre, etc… Illuminated everything he touched. Let actors breathe. Let the soundtrack breathe. When Hollywood funding was not forthcoming he scraped it up himself and kept working. Made beautiful images. Warren Beatty dying in a snowbank. Helicopters descending on Los Angeles. The Last Supper in a Korean MASH tent. Michel Gambon smashing away a rocks glass. "Rufus Rastus Rawlston Brown, whatcha gonna do when the rent comes ‘round?" "Y’all settle down now – this isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville."

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART THREE. FILM NOIR: What are you trying to tell us, Hollywood? That you remember your roots? Or that Lauren Bacall forgot her contact lenses? I think the corny-wonderful coming-attraction supers are kind of a cheat. Are we supposed to laugh at some of the best movies ever made? But we chase the bad taste with the genuine bad taste of a Steve Colbert joint!

DOC SHORT SUBJECTS: Terence Howard, your moment in the sun has arrived – oh shit, cat’s throwing up on my bed, gotta go. (P.S. not kidding.)

PENGUINS. Oh, those wacky French. What would they have done with the stuffed penguins if they’d lost? What an embarrassing post-show interview. "We do not win, but, eh, we steel have ze penguins!" and then they hug the penguins and make moues. Did I spell that right? This is liveblogging, no time to check sources.

ANOTHER BEST SONG NOMINEE allows me to clean up cat vomit without abdicating my citizen-journalist responsibilities.

TIME-LAG OSCARS PART TWO. BEST MAKEUP: "I’m just glad Clooney doesn’t do makeup!" Finally I’m getting the cheese I’ve been craving. Makeup Guy, though awarded for The Chronicles of Narnia, extensively references Maurice Sendak instead of Jesus. Do I have to spell it out for you people?

TECHNICAL AWARDS: "I’m glad I could be a part of it," says Rachel McAdams. This is how they haze starlets. Later she’ll sit in the green room with Julia Roberts and have a laugh, and it won’t all be cocaine-fueled.

BEST SUPPORTING CHICK: Boy, I hope McDormand wins, so she explain that tree-thing on her jacket… oh shit, I’m never going to win this pool. What do those entertainment reporters know that I don’t? Do they, like, go to the movies? A John LeCarre shout! This is all so puzzling, and it’s all moving so fast, I’ve forgotten, if only momentarily, about homosexuals.

TIME-LAG BLOGGING THE OSCARS IN REAL TIME-LAG! PAAAAART OOOONNEE BOYEEEE! Welcome to the Oscars, which all good Americans are supposed to hate for their liberal gayness. I’m actually grateful to have that all out in the open. I sorta had an inkling when I started following these things as a child that my interest was corrupt and vile. Sometimes, like when John Podhoretz gets into the Oscars, we forget that. But thank God or the flying spaghettini spaghetti sauce monster or whatever we decadent creatures are supposed to call it/him/her/Gaia, we have Roger L. Simon, an actual screenwriter, to tell people the real truth. I’ll give you the link later. Or you can go to his site and find it yourself, it ain’t hard.

Well, I don’t have cable, so this is how I get to see Jon Stewart. He’s hilarious. I should have realized that Jon Stewart would be a little ahead of his audience. It works fine because he’s usually a little ahead of his audience (but packs his TV auditors with homosexuals who will laugh at anything). The tentativeness of the laughs just add a little extra layer of hilarity – like Stewart cracks on Walk the Line and Joaquin Phoenix just inflates his face a couple of centimeters.

Music during acceptance speeches? That’s what Oscar has been missing! Now everyone sounds like piano-bar performers telling the crowd to tip their waitress.

BEST SUPPORTING DUDE: Clooney’s speech has humor, and righteousness and self-righteousness in equal measure (well, maybe a little more of the former). Obviously a depth-charge (ah ha ha ha! Git it?) on behalf of the homosexual agenda.

BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS: Does it say something about our culture that a very talented comedian must pretend ineptitude to get laughs? The metaphor for a closeted lifestyle is obvious.

BEST LONG CARTOON: The two guys wearing big bow-ties are obviously channeling teh gay! Why don’t they thank their life-partners?

DOLLY PARTON: Tomorrow when I sober up I’ll look around for links telling us how Dolly isn’t what she used to be since she got involved with the transgenderalist agenda. I am of course talking about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Whorehouses in a musical comedy! These people will do anything to tear down our moral infrastructure.

BEST SHORT MOVIE: Who knew? I based my office pool pick on the pictures and synopses at oscar.com. I lost. That guy looks gay.

BEST SHORT CARTOON: See above, except it’s a couple accepting so the gay – oh wait, life partner check!

BEST "CULINARY CONCEPTIONS THEMSELVES": I should be writing this copy. "Novelist Jane Austen herself would have nodded with approval" – or maybe she would just be nodding!

Vomit break!

EYES ON THE STREET. The Crazy Jesus Lady announces her latest tour of bus stations, ladies' rooms, and public atria:

"You are embarrassing the angels." This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being. I mean to say it with belief, with an eye to instruction, but also pointedly, uncompromisingly. As a lady would. All invited to join in.

Well, at least she's not threatening to tackle Arabs in the street anymore.

But in its own way, this could be even more CrazyJesuLicious! Try to imagine some female Midwestern tourist walking near Grand Central, wearing (as I have seen them do) running pants with the word ANGEL written across the butt. Picture a horrified Crazy Lesus Lady abandoning her shopping cart to accost the woman and, wagging her finger the way the nuns used to (except more violently, so that clouds of dust shake loose of her gauntlets), crying "YOU ARE EMBARRASSING THE ANGELS! YOU ARE EMBARRASSING THE ANGELS!"

Imagine, too, a nearby cop, aware that his first duty as a NYPD officer is to shield tourists from negative experiences, gently laying hands on the Crazy Jesus Lady and bidding her be silent.

Sweet Jesu! call her synapses across the gaping void of her skull, It's the airport strip-search all over again! But now the heathens dare to assault me in public! Thrashing, her arms thrown out in emulation of Christ crucified, she lets out a long, shrill scream: "REEAAGAAAAAAAAAAAAN..."

(I gotta say, I knew this day was coming, but I didn't think it would come so soon.)

UPDATE. The madness spreads! The Anchoress volunteers to join Noonan on global babysitting duty: "When I see teenage suburban girls talking like 7th Avenue streetwalkers while they flick their cigarettes, I will say it. When I hear my feminist friend railing at the unfairness of a biology that forces women to menstruate, but not men, I will say it." Oh, but Sister, have you thought what they might say back to you? Or will you only nag those who seem too weak to talk back? (Yes, evil times indeed, when a lady can't insult with impunity anyone she pleases! Though if you look and sound like Maggie Smith in Gosford Park, you might get away with it.)

To be fair, The Anchoress also pledges to crack on herself when she does wrong in her own eyes, which puts her a step at least ahead of the Crazy Jesus Lady.

ALL IS WELL! We seem to be getting lots of panicky Don't Panic messages about Iraq these days. The authors of these messages curse liberals and the media, as usual, but increasingly include on their shit list the American people as a body.

Victor Davis Hanson, for example, reads a list of negative features of our occupation (tendentiously conflating Abu Ghraib with the flushed Koran story, as if torture/murders were the equivalent of a newsman's gaffe), and then dismisses any and all concerns with this ineptitude and depravity as "American hysteria," "acrimony at home" about which there is a "disturbing sameness." (Well, what the hell, why not throw in an aesthetic objection?) Among the wrong-thinkers, Hanson interestingly names not only his usual despised liberals but also some conservatives "who insisted that we needed more initial troops are often the same ones who now decry that too much money has been spent in Iraq."

In fact, we -- not the Royal kind -- are to blame, at least as compared to the sainted military: while "we point fingers at each other," says Hanson, "soldiers under fire point to their achievements." This is followed by patriotic mush, Kiplingesque complaints about how hard war is to do properly ("Put too many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we earn the wages of imperialism... Yet deploy too few troops, and instability arises in Kabul and Baghdad"), and finally the warning that we are in danger of losing the war at home. (That means you, citizen! Put out that light!)

A similar tactic is employed by Fifty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters only, as we have come to expect from the General, more hilariously. The Kipling musk here suffuses the entire column: the Iraqi people are portrayed as children whose "moral infrastructure" was "wrecked" by Saddam Hussein, and who must be re-parented by the U.S. Armed Forces. Like a good Daddy, G.I. Joe will "deliver expertise and spare parts, but won't do their work for them." That's how they learn! (And all those bombs we dropped on them? That's like a skinned knee.)

By God, these little monkeys may yet make it -- if you treasonous Americans don't fuck things up! "I didn't see any of our self-righteous critics in the Risalah slum," sneered the General. "But I did see Sgt. Maurice Harris, Spec. Victor Tsung and PFC (hey, promote that guy!) Brad Sheets, along with their comrades in arms. They were soldiers to the core..." And we see them marching into history, superimposed over an American flag on a hill, while the soundtrack plays "Have You Forgotten When Saddam Bombed the WalMart?" So who are you punks to question the soldiers' successes at sewage treatment in this little town -- and, by extension, throughout the Middle East? In a sidebar the General warns the People: "You are being lied to. By elements in the media determined that Iraq must fail. Just give 'em the Bronx cheer." And we'll be paying attention to who blows and who doesn't, maggot!

The thing you have to remember is: these people have been in charge for years. They run the Executive and Legislative Branches of the Federal Governments, and most Statehouses and State Legislatures. We are ruled, for all intents and purposes, by an unfettered and barely-challenged Republican Party. They have been left free to put their heaven-sent recipes for glory into operation.

And yet, citizens who are not commie-faggot-punk-MSMers are still losing faith in the cooked-up Iraq adventure.

So the Party in Power scrambles: they're going to shift from blaming whatever little troubles (be it a humorously misplaced Koran, or a man beaten to death by U.S. military "consultants") on that bale of straw called Libruls, to blaming it on us, by which they mean you.

It's worth a try. If it doesn't work, South Dakota can always float a law instituting the Rule of the Saints up to the Supremes. For every problem, there is a solution.

UPDATE. Must be something in the air because lots of smarter people than me are on this case. (Warning: some of this stuff involves Jeff Goldstein, so if you follow the links back to their source be prepared for long debate-club dissertations about how you don't understand English etc.)