THE POWER OF POSITIVE NON-THINKING. Christine Rosen has an interesting TNR article about the Ole Perfesser and why he sucks. She has one very good point -- that is, that the Perfesser's idea that new technology will improve political writing (and just about everything else) is disproved by the Perfesser's own blog:

But what would we-dia actually look like? This is a question that can be easily answered by InstaPundit. Reynolds's blog consists largely of links to news or opinion articles and other blogs followed by comments consisting of such profound observations as "Heh," or "Read the whole thing," or "Indeed." (These are recurring tropes whose centrality can't be exaggerated.)...

...Reynolds exposes how the blogosphere, at its worst, values timeliness over thought. After linking to an article on congressional earmarks, he'll add, "Well, that's encouraging. Sheesh." Quod erat demonstrandum. Or he'll carp, "Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is just dumb"--a point that may be perfectly true but probably requires some explanation or proof beyond the simple assertion. In the end, this method provides the intellectual horsepower of, say, an Andy Rooney commentary. To wit, he wrote in December, "A battery recall on the XM portables. Is it just me, or are we seeing more battery recalls lately." Well, no need for The New York Times, then.

But Rosen is a little compromised here. She characterizes the Perfesser as a "libertarian," and strongly implies that his techno-utopianism is based on that political orientation. Libertarians "believe that technology, in many cases, obviates the need for government," says Rosen, though we may assume that this free-wheeling approach will do for our society what InstaPundit has done for political commentary -- that is, nothing good.

You should keep in mind that Rosen also writes for the Ethics and Public Policy Center -- in this essay, she compares embryonic stem cell advocates to eugenicists. So for her the central meaning of Glenn Reynolds is Science Gone Too Far, or about to go there. But her Reynolds essay is in The New Republic, so she doesn't emphasize the baby-killing power of the Perfesser's brave new world, leaning instead on the blogosphere's threat to the sort of "peer review" and "sustained research" one finds at... The New Republic. This woman will never starve.

We've gone round and round here at alicublog about Perfesser's Reynolds' politics. As I've said before, take any page's worth of postings at InstaPundit, and the POV will remind you more of Hugh Hewitt than of Harry Browne.

What Rosen takes for libertarianism in the Perfesser's case is just laziness. He's an educated Babbitt who thinks everything will work out because it's worked out for him. That's why he loves the idea of robots and gadgets and web toys that will save the world while he sits on his ass. That's why he was so juiced about the "Cedar Revolution," with its cell phone photos of protest babes -- and so bummed when Israel wound up bombing Lebanon anyway. That's the real source of the "triumphalism" that bothers Rosen -- not science, but its opposite: an unshakable faith in one's own obliviousness.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND FUCKING BULLSHIT. You might have heard that Christian groups are trying to stop the HPV vaccine because such a vaccine would encourage women to have sex. You might have read the words of a spokesman for the powerful Family Research Council who said, "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex," and of the President of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, who said, "It sends the wrong message... Our concern is that this vaccine will be marketed to a segment of the population that should be getting a message about abstinence."

Well, the FRC has sort of come around on this:

The Family Research Council welcomes the news that vaccines are in development for preventing infection with certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease. We also welcome the recent reports of promising clinical trials for one such vaccine.

I say "sort of" because the FRC strongly opposes making the vaccine mandatory, as its Vice-President recently made clear. Which means, if they get their way (and they will -- look who's in the White House), that the vaccine won't work, basically. Mandatory vaccination would kill HPV as dead as polio, but unlike polio, HPV can be used to scare people out of fucking, which is bigger priority than life and death for the Jesus freaks; so we are fated to a hit-or-miss approach that will keep the cervical cancer precursor around for years to come.

You might be mad at these lunatics, but OpinionJournal says you're wrong -- the vaccine's real enemies are "people who might be called liberals":

They can't bring themselves to fully celebrate a cancer vaccine because it won't be instantly available to everyone. Women in the Third World, where cervical cancer claims the bulk of its victims, can't afford a $360 course of HPV immunization--so only the rich people and pharmaceutical companies benefit, one lament goes. And wouldn't more American lives be saved if the government spent money instead on reaching more people with basic health care?

The author does not provide any quotes to support this ridiculous attribution. And why would he bother? As OpinionJournal authors are taught at orientation, it doesn't matter how absurd and unsupported such articles are, because the only people paying attention are true believers like the one published respondent to this one:

The reason why we are not inoculating our children against cervical cancer is the same reason why we are not issuing birth control pills or condoms to them. In human morality a point is reached where you have to tip your hand regarding your value system and the relative importance of things to you and your family. To many, chastity and celibacy trump physical protection from disease.

That cowboy cracked the code. It remains to be seen whether professional journalists at other venues will be as sharp.

COUPLA MOVIES:

Rent. I saw this thing when it came out on Broadway, and it annoyed the crap out of me: the squatters were idealized beyond recognition, and made shitty art besides, which fatally trivialized their beef with The Man and made them look like the kids from Fame but in an alternate, distressed wardrobe, and with less reliably pleasing tunes (and numbing recitative passages like "What are you DO-ing with this YUP-pie SCUM?"). That left AIDS as the only real antagonist, and I was repulsed by the dramatic shortcut: you mean I paid all this money for a musical version of Spirochette? But what annoyed me most was that I wound up being moved by the thing. It was a mess, but some embers of real feeling burned in it.

My Rent movie experience was similar. The things that had been bad about the stage version are even worse in the film -- the East Village locale is even more slicked-up (which makes the kids' gripes even harder to figure: you live in this sweet loft for free and you're complaining?), the "art" is even more of a joke, and most of the good songs are very badly served by their updated stylings: first, they make them sound like overproduced contemporary pop, which comparison flatters neither party; second, while the stage setting gave the players license to just belt many of the tunes, Chris Columbus is always fussing and it seldom helps. On stage, my favorite song, "Santa Fe," was just sung and enjoyed; here the characters try to find new ways to be goofy in a subway car, which made me wish I was watching The Warriors instead.

And yet. Rent isn't much of a story, but some of the characters are facing an implacable enemy, and their friends try to help them. Jonathan Larson was evidently not prepared to achieve the grand thing he was going for (and never got another chance), but he was able to get some of that situation up and moving. And I find it especially poignant that it was able to poke through all the feeble razzmatazz. That "One Song Glory" Roger is always talking about didn't amount to much, but something did.

Match Point. The movie's virtues are basic: it has a crackling story, it's extremely well-acted, and the directing is as solid as one might expect from someone who's been making a film a year since the mid-Seventies. The ponderous visual strategies of earlier Woody Allen movies like Interiors and Stardust Memories -- cameras lingering on vacated spaces, self-conscious groupings -- have all burned away now; Match Point has only one willful coup de cinema -- parallel shots of an object striking a barrier -- and it's very well done.

The conveyance is fine; what it's conveying is a little dicey. The plot gives us a young tennis pro named Chris who comes to London and happens into great success -- a fortunate marriage and a leg up in big business. But he has an affair which threatens to destroy all he's gained.

As anyone who's read three sentences about Match Point knows, the film is full of references to luck. It starts with them and ends with them and they're peppered throughout. But though chance puts Chris in several pivotal situations, luck has no more, and often a good deal less, to do with his choices and how they work out than does his character. We learn early on that Chris is intelligent and methodical; he knows what he wants and uses considerable skill, and even deception, to obtain it. (We see immediately, for instance, that he isn't interested in the woman who will become his wife but for the opportunity she represents.) Not everyone would play things the way he does, and the pleasure of the film is watching how he, specifically, turns a great setup into a threat to himself, and how he then endeavors to get out of it.

The one stroke of fate that does turn a key plot development is the subject of one of the bravura shots mentioned above, but that only connects it to the other bravura shot -- a moment of serendipity that's pleasing, but doesn't add up to anything except more guff about luck (and, unfortunately, fresh guff about Sophocles).

Woody Allen has cleaned up his mise en scene but he's still got an annoying pretentious streak. Still, it's reassuring that it takes up so little of the screen time, and that he's moving in the right direction. And he's probably got several more movies ahead of him. Any serious artist in that situation is worth sticking with.

ALTHOUSE AND BUTT-HEAD. Ann Althouse, some of whose vaporous aestheticizing has been denounced here before, talks about a big silly artist who said a silly thing:

I want to like novelists. Really, I do. For example, T.C. Boyle. I read him sometimes. That is to say: I subordinate my mind to his and let his thoughts become my thoughts. But then I read quotes like this, and it sets me to wondering all over again about this practice of reading novels. They're written by novelists, you know.

She's already told us she doesn't like fiction films, and now she's starting to come out against fiction itself. I expect her to denounce graven images next month.

Even better are her commenters:

But keep in mind (gee, this is going to sound like the "good muslims" argument) that any writer who pipes up with anything but leftist cant will make serious enemies for life.

Imagine T.C. Boyle biting his tongue, terrified to denounce gay marriage lest David Remnick destroy his career! The general consensus is that artists are stupid and bad and nobody should pay attention to them. All pretty hilarious, but I do feel sorry for the more extreme cases:

This is exactly why I almost never read interviews. So many artists have been entirely ruined for me due to the asinine things they've said in interviews.

Think what a horrible, parched life that must be: unable to enjoy art unless you approve of its creators' politics.

SHORTER "DAY BY DAY": Andrew Sullivan's a fag.

These guys get worse all the time. I had some hope for Winger, but the further Carson Fire gets from his bookstore characters, the nuttier he becomes. Here's a fine example: Fire seems to have gone through the C.S. Lewis reeducation program, where all signs of whimsy are draped in heavy allegory until they suffocate. I don't know whether the birds in this one are supposed to be Muslims or secular scientists, but they sure are black!

Thank Gaia for Free Republic's Friday Toons! "The United Nations is a fag" has a mad genius "Andrew Sullivan's a fag" lacks. And if you're going to slag the MSM, I say go all the way! People deserves it for not making Sean Connery the Sexiest Man Alive in perpetuity. ("Sean Connery, 96, died from injuries sustained two days ago, when he tried to wink at some cameras and badly sprained his cheek. Connery will remain Sexiest Man Alive for two more years, said People's editors, if the late actor's family will abide by the taxidermal clause in his contract.")

And their Hitlery-hatred has mutated in a fascinating way: think about it -- not even the Devil would be used this way; it's so random it would offend the judgment of a "The World According to Jim" fan. Right-wingers are often playful in the use of signifiers, but the Clintons push them into visual incoherence. And in a world sorely lacking in transcendence, that's rather touching.

SHORTER NATIONAL REVIEW DORKS: Evil liberals seek to rob us of our war-rage -- Thank Jesus for that great American patriot, Oliver Stone!

UPDATE. To understand what's so deeply funny about this -- I mean besides their sudden, raging hard-on for a man they previously considered one of the "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" -- I will call out a short yip from K-Lo's ravings:

As it happens, the most refreshing thing about Stone’s new film is that it is anything but political. You want your politicians political, not your movie producers. But it’s impossible not to take a political message from the movie, all the same — whatever the chatterers may or may not say about it in the coming weeks...

This breathless rush of words -- it's not political, but it is political, but oh those chatterers will seek to spin it, against which I chatter and spin... -- shows what the term "willing suspension of disbelief" means to these people: not just a temporary, conditional acceptance of a staged reality, but a descent into global fantasy.

Conservatives of this class (and not all conservatives belong to it, I hasten to remind you) are, like the rest of us, deeply affected by art -- but their creed allows them only one response to any surge of deep feelings: find a way to feed it to the Borg.

At one point, Lopez cries out, "movies matter" -- and if you have any acquaintance with her work, and that of her colleagues, you know exactly what she means: movies matter because they can be used as propaganda. Hamartia, catharsis, a deeper understanding of what it means to be human -- yeah yeah, blah blah, but Ollie Stone's latest pic will "partner" well with "Rick Santorum’s Thursday speech at the National Press Club" in this lot's never-ending PsyOps simulation.

I love Oliver Stone for many reasons, perhaps especially for writing one of the funniest lines in the history of cinema ("Daddy, are they going to kill us like they killed President Kennedy?"). But if I find myself wondering what effect his next film will have on the price of wheat or a Congressional election in Pennsylvania, I will call you and ask you to kill me. (I believe in you! I know you can do it!)

UPDATE II. I may have gotten the JFK quote wrong. This site has it as dialogue between Garrison and his kids:

"Are we going away, Daddy?"
"I don't know, Jasper."
"Because of Kennedy?" "Will the same people kill us, Papa?"

Still pretty funny; I guess I was gilding a lily. I love moments like that, and am grateful to commenter Nance for giving us another Ollie howler ("Well, Jim Morrison! You've ruined another Thanksgiving!").

When life gets me down, I think of Juliette Lewis telling Woody Harrelson, "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!" Then everything seems better.

FETAL FUNHOUSE. It's hard to tell which circumstance produces funnier conservatism: when they lose, or when they win. As Bush's stem-cell veto is a definite victory for the National Review folks, you'd think they'd be in a relaxed and magnanimous mood about it. But their commentaries are comically strained and overreaching -- as if they know that the legislative success were but a chimera, and the struggle against bad wrong people thinking bad wrong things never-ending.

Kathryn Jean Lopez' offering has a wonderful premise: she's not anti-science -- the embryonic research advocates are! The advocates, you see, preferred the bill they eventually submitted to a more watery alternative, proving they weren't really serious about asking for what they didn't want:

Proponents of embryo-destroying research lost one of their favorite knee-jerk rhetorical points on Tuesday, as they succeeded in killing a bill that would have funded alternatives to embryo-destroying research...

Coming from a crowd that regularly throws the word “anti-science” at those who oppose embryo destruction and cloning, this is pretty rich. When given the option to vote for a bill that nearly no one could sensibly disagree with, they acted like spoiled two-year-olds who want their way and only their way — even if it’s impractical and Dad has already said “no.”

(Not sure who "Dad" is in this context. Maybe Lopez means her Dad.) I can see that the Democrats had a political interest in pushing the stronger bill -- might that be what Lopez is trying to say? No, what she's trying to say if these Congresscritters don't care what kind of bill they pass as long as it kills babies, because they are babykillers who love to kill babies until all the babies are killed:

On the federal level this week we’ve seen supposed proponents of stem-cell research say, No, none of this alternatives stuff, we only want embryonic-stem-cell research. The embryo is everything. Or rather, destroying embryos is everything -- that’s where they want research to be focused, and they’re happy to hold research that is free of embryonic entanglements hostage.

I so want to work DESTROYING EMBRYOS IS EVERYTHING into my coat of arms. The end of her article is a joy, too: "...such clear Party of Death votes as we saw Tuesday night in the House should be as deadly to political careers as they are to life." Citizens, do your duty -- stand outside the U.S. Congress waving fetuses and screaming!

Elsewhere, Maureen L. Condic hears Michael Kinsley argue that insensate clumps of cells are not people, and Candic knows where that sort of thinking slippery-slopes: to organ-farming in unwilling, live patients by 2036. (What, no sooner? Destroying embryos is everything!)

And let's not forget: these days, along with being evil and stupid, all liberals are uncivil. Joseph Loconte draws this beat, and compares the dirty-mouthed babykillers to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, who responded to Bush's veto this way: "That's all right, we'll just sit here in the dark." Well, pretty near that, anyway. "I disagree with [the UOJCA]," says Loconte, "but I’m grateful that they have a seat at the table." Yeah -- if they're as wishy-washy as they sound, maybe Loconte can get 'em to pay for dinner.

I suppose if Bush had suddenly gone crazy and signed rather than vetoed the bill, these writers could have been even more entertaining. But surely it would have been much easier for them: plug a thesaurus into your outrage, and stand back! Today's stories requires something that is almost like thinking, but ever so much more difficult.

COME BACK, IDIOTS! Strange days indeed on the "Kill 'em all, let Mom sort my socks" Right.

Billy Kristol is going "Vrrrrow, Vrrrrow, rat-tat-tat-tat" and dive-bombing his shampoo and conditioner bottles in the tub; Roger L. Simon is telling the terrified Lebanese citizens to take their bombing like men -- "Starbucks can come later, if you really think you need it" (?!? -- RE); and this guy cheerfully compares the new Mideast war to a plucky little sailor (Israel) beating the shit out a Marine (Hezbollah) -- with (one must assume) Beirut's civilians in the role of unfortunate bystanders to the brawl who are struck by the Marine's flying teeth, which for some reason are filled with high explosives. It's getting so George Fucking Will sounds almost sane.

My favorite so far is Hugh Hewitt, who asks why some conservatives have started to get cold feet about Bush's foreign policy, which Hewitt finds divinely inspired. (Hewitt calls such refuseniks "180s.") Of course he doesn't wait for input, as he is perfectly capable of answering the question himself:

In attempting to tell us what drives Bush, [Jonathan] Chait is in fact revealing what it is that drives the former supporters of the war turned defeatists and the increasingly frenzied denouncers from respectable perches like the big papers, the Council, and the weeklies: They feel disdained.

[Gregory] Djerejian , [Andrew] Sullivan, and Chait... Each wears their exclusion on their sleeve, and their bitterness is bubbling up with every column or post.

I think the disdain they feel is more imagined than real. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc haven't really got time to worry about the left behind and now embittered former supporters of the war.

Here one might ask: what kind of access and attention were these guys receiving before that has since been withheld, causing their illusion of being disdained? Did I miss Condi Rice whirling Djerejian across the dance floor in NeoCon People? Has Sullivan ever needed more peer approval than the occasional drunken midnight phone call from Christopher Hitchens doubtless still provides?

Of course not. This is pure slander, of the sort that straight-up GOP operatives like Hewitt are using more than ever, in this their degenerate phase, to warn waverers away from the path of open rebellion.

I cannot respect this, but on the theory that all God's creatures deserve respect of some sort, I can give it up for Hewitt's nerve in playing the game even further out, and suggesting a concrete plan of action for making the apostates feel the love once again:

Hand holding may, however, be necessary. It would be good if Karl Rove considered some way to at least address various members of this set.

It is summer. Set the interns to finding the 180s, and have them over to the Indian Treaty Room. Hear them out. Have the president drop by for a face-to-face...

Make sure the retired generals -- all of them, not just the vocal critics -- are in the room, and the Beinarts, Wills, Djejerians. Keep the numbers relatively small, and hold a few of them if necessary.

The stakes are too high to allow such divisions to grow unaddressed. Even if some are too far gone into opposition to be recalled, some will wake up.

What's most interesting about this plan is that, while it suggests that the dissenters be put in the same room with Bush and his crew, and thus "addressed," it does not admit any possibility that the Bush people will take any suggestions at all from their former, passionate supporters.

Hewitt seems to think all the President has to do is meet-and-greet these lost lambs, and a significant number of them will rescind their objections and get back in for the Big Win.

Were I one of these former saps, I'd have to wonder if Hewitt had always felt this much contempt for my intelligence -- even in the days when he was patting my back.

THE U.S.S. POSEIDON. Ross Douthat has up a couple of unusually contemplative posts about the unacquaintance with war of many war fans. From the latter:

Specifically, if you believe fervently in the idea that the War on Terror really is World War IV, the defining foreign-policy moment of your generation and the most important challenge facing the United States for forty years to come, and you happen to be the ideal age, marital status, and so forth to sign up to serve your country - in the military, the CIA, wherever - then you have a real obligation to strongly consider it. And I do mean strongly - not just bat it around as a possibility, as so many of us did after 9/11, knowing that we would never actually do anything about.

I should add that Douthat favors this POV over an alleged declaration that non-combatants should never authorize military force, which I have never heard anyone seriously make.

Actually Douthat takes the thing further than I would. He suggests that involvement in combat would make policymakers and pundits better qualified to decide matters of war and peace on a human level -- chickenhawkery as "less a problem that flows from cowardice, and more one that flows from ignorance."

But it should be pointed out that there are already plenty of active-duty soldiers who favor the war -- and many of them have blogs. Their writings are available to all Americans with internet access. Why then not fire the chickenhawks, or at least push them to one side, and back to the max the folks who are already living the Douthat dream?

I assume that Douthat knows about these guys, but isn't getting from them what he wants -- because no one, not even a grunt with a way with words, can give him what he really wants.

Today there is much talk among the cognoscenti about World War Whatever, but while we are often told by our leaders about threats we must defend ourselves against -- "one vial, one canister... to bring a day of horror like one we have never known" etc. -- no one has been able to tell the American people what shared cause they must fight for. War advocates frequently admit this, but suggest terms that are not very rousing -- e.g. Victor Davis Hanson:

The Bush administration should stop repeating that it is fighting the war on terror for truth, justice and the American way. Instead, the president and his staff should be blunt and explain that, since Sept. 11, it has had to choose between options that are bad or far worse.

This is a war cry as given by realists, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" it ain't. The basis of their argument is not a shared American purpose, but a shared American fear. We are not put in the position of patriots fighting to keep aloft the flame of liberty, but of movie characters trying to get out of an upended U.S.S. Poseidon -- though the overwhelming majority of us feel not the rising waters.

I have puzzled for a long time over the ungodly fury of conservative writers at Hollywood and other outlets of popular culture for not providing war propaganda. Why don't they make their own movies, I have wondered, with the backing of one or another right-wing millionaire, of which there are plenty? I see now that they are actually pleading for help. They don't have what it takes to reach their fellow-citizens at the deepest level -- they have the reach, the money, and the power, but they don't have a song. And without a song a man ain't got a friend; without a song the road would never bend. Despite their political dominance, their ideas -- being paltry things, having to do with the right of people with money to more money, and hatred of homosexuals -- only accumulate upon the topsoil of culture, and do not penetrate to the water-table from which dreams are fed.

By throwing some of their fair-haired boys into combat, they may hope to get some war poets for themselves. That crop doesn't always come out as they might want. But if gets Jonah Goldberg into a uniform, I'm all for it.

RAISING THE TONE OF OUR DISCOURSE. More dudgeon at Nat Rev about out-of-control lefty blog-commenters. Someone brings up Free Republic; John Podhoretz actually takes the point for a couple of seconds; scientists watch in breathless anticipation, hoping for a chain reaction of common sense; alas, outside forces put a quick end to it:

UPDATE: Gerry Daly of RedState e-mails that I'm being unfair to Free Republic, which does moderate and delete inappropriate material. Its guidelines include : "Free Republic reserves the right to remove any postings that are considered inappropriate. Examples of inappropriate posts are those that are off-subject or contain advertising, pornography, obscene material, racist material, bigotry, Nazi (or other hate group) material, materials promoting violence, threats or illegal acts, etc." Couldn't find anything comparable at tpmcafe or DailyKos.

Nor will Podhoretz find anything like this -- from a July 17 Oprah Winfrey thread at Free Republic which took me three seconds to locate -- at tpm:

Oprah has the right body type for being a 'fag hag'. Most of them I've known are usually obese straight gals who have low self-esteem.

This is only a present example, of course. Assuming he's not just playing dumb, Podhoretz could learn a lot about Free Republic by following it for a few days, or even just for a couple of Lincoln's Birthdays, when the Freepers really let their hair down ("Happy Birthday to the American Hitler known as Abe Lincoln"). It's always enlightening to read them on the topics of the day; as a fellow citizen, Podhoretz might be interested in Freeper attitudes about New Yorkers and 9/11 ("The liberal parasites of New York are not capable of recognition of bravery, of sacrife....the liberal trash of your state is only concerned WITH SELF, encouraged on by their witch of a so-called Senator..."), etc.

Freepers are for the most part more hilarious than offensive (except to the extent that they offend logic), but equally hilarious is the claim that a worn-out and often disregarded sheet of dos-and-donts stuck on the door makes Free Republic a cleaner establishment than Kos'.

COME LET US REASON TOGETHER. In his latest contribution to the liberals-hate-jews meme drive, James Lileks quotes with scorn a guy who asks, "is it totally beyond the pale that these two Israeli soliders were instructed to allow themselves to be kidnapped in order to foster the chain of events" leading to Mideast war.

That does sound a little silly. Contrast it with the musings of major conservative intellectual Jonah Goldberg:

...several readers have raised the other possibility that some of the [Lebanese] "civilians" [killed so far] are in fact members of Hezbollah and the Western press takes casualty reports at face value. Maybe. It's not like we haven't see that before. Still, most of these casualties must in fact be civilians — the refugee caravan for example — and Israel has not denied as much.

Sometimes I try to imagine what it's like inside that rat's-nest Goldberg calls a brain. Through the centuries artists have had a hard time representing the processes of the human mind, but for Goldberg a loud recording of "Alexander's Ragtime Band" regularly punctuated by Kool-Aid Man yelling "Oh, yeah!" should just about cover it.

SHORTER JOSH TREVINO: The terror attacks of July 7, 2005 did not break the will of the British People. Well, better luck next time!

LET US CLASP HANDS OVER THE BLOODY CHASM. Just when I'd posted again on the Perfesser's dodginess on gay marriage, he comes up with an exceptionally long post that is much less equivocal on the subject.

I could comb through the thing and come up with cavils, but in general I Approve This Message. The Perfesser previously took the position that the greatest obstacle to gay marriage was gay marriage advocates (whom he obliquely compared to the Black Panthers). This was typical of his tendency to turn every issue into a stick to beat liberals, and I reasonably inferred that it was his only interest in the pro-marriage argument. But the new post is a lot less like that.

At the same time, I was wondering what terror-warrior Michael Totten would feel about Israel bombing all those nice (and not so nice) people he met while touring Lebanon earlier this year. Turns out he reacts like a normal human being:

Insulting my personal friends while they are driven out of their homes as war refugees is not acceptable. My old neighborhood is under attack. My friends are terrified and in danger. How on earth do you expect me to feel about this right now?...

Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.

This is encouraging, too. I can imagine, say, Jonah Goldberg going to Lebanon and having the same encounters Totten had and, upon returning, still cheerfully discussing which World War this is. But it is nice to know that some of the people with whom I disagree are not thoroughly depraved.

SHORTER RONALD RADOSH: When Batista told the world Castro was dead, Herbert Matthews dug around, learned the truth, and reported it. And that treasonous method persists to this very day at the Times!

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER. Don't worry, fans -- I'll come out against gay marriage before Giuliani does!

(He's halfway there already. The libertarian beard has outlived its usefulness, and the Missus needs new clients.)

MAKE A WISH. Finally saw Brokeback Mountain. It was good to wait to see it, I think; during its theatrical run I was too incensed by the many,many, imbecile ravings about it to keep myself from siding with it. Now it's barely even a Leno punchline anymore, and I have more space to appreciate it calmly.

All I know of Ang Lee besides this is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which I like with reservations, though with no reservations at all about the elegaic final movement. Early on, I was convinced Brokeback's slow pace was a device to keep us from busting out laughing at the sharp deviation from traditional form -- you know, two cowboys bond on the open range, then, presto, ass-fucking. But like most slow-paced movies, Brokeback is very concerned with and serious about time. Ennis and Jack's early days are a cherished memory, so of course they are made long enough to stay in the mind through the rest of the film.

I was surprised and impressed by the absence of villains. A few horrible people pop up (like Randy Quaid with his bullet head), emissaries from the rottenness that keeps the boys apart, but for the most part Ennis and Jack are surrounded by decent people, doing the best they know how, and for the most part these folks are more hurt by Ennis and Jack's frustrated love than they are inclined to hurt them for it. ("Girls don't fall in love with fun.") The cowtowns of Brokeback are not cesspools of ignorant hatred, but small, simple communities where enmities as old as time have never been questioned, and it would take more than most of us have in us to question them under those circumstances. The boys might almost have been a Hatfield and a McCoy.

In fact, for (I think) straight viewers at least, the gay angle actually illuminates rather than limits the love story, because the taboo on their love is so ingrained in us that we don't need to have it explained in artificial "two houses, both alike in dignity" terms -- terms we know are a writer's invention, and which our minds will automatically try to get around throughout the story, devising alternate, happier endings. Not that we won't root for Ennis and Jack -- of course we will -- but nobody goes into a love story between two men in 1963 rural America with any hope that things will work out.

Lee's use of beautiful landscapes reminded me of Kubrick's in Barry Lyndon. They have very different strategies, of course, but they're equally canny. In Barry Lyndon, the natural world is an ironic counterpoint to the artifice-obsessed machinations of the characters. In Brokeback, where the skies are most exhilirating when the boys are together, it's a way of showing the richness of the romance that might have been, especially when the characters are most tormented by it. The final frame, with its little lush photo-card and window views set off by Ennis' single-wide sarcophagus, is only the most sublime example.

Time slows back down for the end of the movie. I thought of Crouching Tiger again, with the daughter (there spiritual, here actual) heading off into the unknown to plumb those mysteries that had betrayed our heroes. I got the feeling Ennis' girl knew something about Jack, though not enough to connect her destiny in any way with her father's -- but youth is ever optimistic. For all the heartbreak, it was good to be left with even a provisional note of hope.

SHORTER NICOLE GELINAS. Long Islanders won't buy flood insurance because they saw the luxurious Federal benefits enjoyed by Hurricane Katrina survivors and thought, "Hey, how can I get some of that?"

THE HE-MAN HOMO-HATERS CLUB. Since gay people can't get married, and in the view of oafs like Tim Graham and Brent Bozell they should never ever ever ever be able to get married, shouldn't they then be encouraged to channel their frustrated familial energies into some kind of healthful physical activity, like sports? Apparently not. Graham:

The New York Times is a "global sponsor" of next week's international "Gay Games" in Chicago. Just how much can the Times lend its prestigious "mainstream media" brand to the libertine left?

Bozell:

The newspaper is a "global sponsor" of the seventh "Gay Games" taking place in Chicago from July 15 to 22.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Gay Games.

(Cue sinister music, archival footage of Joe DiMaggio slowly subsumed in a pink wash.)

Who would sponsor this stupidity? The New York Times is not alone; it is joined by other "objective" news outlets. The Chicago Sun-Times and WMAQ-TV, the local NBC-owned and operated affiliate, are also "global sponsors." They share the Gay Games goals, to "foster and augment the self-respect of lesbians and gay men throughout the world and to engender respect and understanding from the nongay world."

Got that, nongayers? Whatever happened to "objective" media outlets at least pretending to avoid taking sides?

First, I have to object to this new nomenclature for heterosexuals. I refuse to let myself be called a "nongayer." I'll suck cock first!

Second, if the idea of "respect and understanding" for homosexuals is partisan, then so are faith, hope, and charity, buying Girl Scout cookies, etc. I doubt Bozell's analysis extends that far, but then, to paraphrase Jack Warden in Bullets Over Broadway, I also doubt that his spinal cord reaches his brain.

Some years back I saw an early Gay Games event -- a hockey match in miserable old Abe Stark Arena in Coney Island. As hockey is not a big gay sport (or wasn't at that time -- I haven't kept up), the teams were ragtag, and the playing clumsy though spirited. (Again I was reminded of that old Detroit sportswriter, lost to history or to me at least, who had described inept outfielders chasing fly balls: "like kittens chasing after bees.")

But in the course of the game the players improved in confidence, and began to complete passes and make creditable shots on goal; there was even a little hard checking and shoving. In short, they were acting like your basic hockey players. If the sparse crowd seemed less likely to evolve into your basic hockey crowd ("KILL 'EM!" cried one fellow, and his companion countered, "NO, DON'T KILL 'EM, JUST WIN!"), that was fine; fans in Tampa Bay are never going to act like fans in, say, Philly, and that's all part of the beautiful rainbow.

My friend who was in the match was an inveterate Rangers fan who regularly hauled his gay ass up to the blue seats (Hextall... get a Porsche!). He loved the game but rarely got to practice his moves -- not a gender-pref thing, just a New York desk worker thing. The Gay Games wasn't his shot at being scouted into the NHL, but his chance to be on a team, try himself in competition, and maybe get a little better.

The Gay Games organization was in the same boat. I see it has indeed gotten better, and drawn more high-level support. Now why would anyone be angry at that?

For guys like Graham and Bozell, the chance to rip the Times is always as ripe cheese to a rat, and the gay factor jacks up their blood-lust considerably. But what builds up the (as the trainers like to call it) explosive strength of their fury is the notion of gay folk playing sports.

Once homosexuals were total outcasts, fit for whatever abuse (including the sexual variety) the straight world wished to dish at them. Then gays started popping out of closets, marching down Fifth Avenue, appearing on TV shows. It became explicitly not cool to beat them to death. In fact, the Grahams and Bozells found to their horror, it became uncool to even joke about it.

It was the times, not the New York Times, that created the tension under which our Grahams and Bozells currently labor. Usually, to dispel some of the stress they go take a vigorous ride on their gay-marriage hobbyhorse. But every once in a while they get a signal to go into Amok Time.

And what can blow a bigot's mind worse than some sissy-mary being able to beat him at sports?

AS LONG AS I'M IN A FRIVOLOUS* MOOD, WHY DON'T I WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT LILEKS?

Am I the only person who loved the first “Pirates of the Caribbean,” yet fears the sequel will feel like six hours of rubber hoses to the kidney? Hollywood ruins everything, it seems...

The first Pirates, as we all know, was not made by Hollywood, but by ordinary citizens like you 'n' me who banged open the doors of Universal Studios with an airline beverage cart.

I could keep this up all day, and maybe I will.

UPDATE. For all the people who think I'm unfair to Lileks -- and I am -- get a load of this new Bleat, in which he strenuously and at length misapprehends a Joel Stein column, finally comparing Stein to a man peeing in a public pool. One is reminded of Ben Stiller yelling at a duck in that episode of "Friends."

There's only one language these people understand. The eternal slap-fight continues!

*UPDATE II. Typo in my own headline! I, a former proofreader! A Vanyaesque comedown. Fixed.

TALENT SHOW. Got bored, decided to check out some of those Republican-with-an-explanation types. You can get a good idea of how Neo-neocon operates from this meditation on a "Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican" bumper sticker:

Someone's idea, no doubt, of humor, based on the slogan "Friends don't let friends drive drunk."

But it doesn't seem all that funny to me, not by a longshot. Although it's ostensibly being said tongue-in-cheek, there's a certain hardnosed sentiment behind it, one I've encountered way too many times. It's a sentiment that -- although espoused by a person who no doubt would identify him/herself as a liberal -- embodies the opposite of traditional liberal thought.

What an interesting idea of friendship, that it must march in lockstep, belief matching belief. What an interesting idea of Republicanism; that it's something pernicious and dangerous, something from which friends must be protected. What an interesting idea of voting; that it's something you "let" or "don't let" someone do.

Yes, I know: lighten up, neo...

She didn't leave the Left, the Left left her. It's easy to see why.

Git yer Liberal Hunting License here, though you might prefer one of these.

UPDATE. I meant this to be a mere bag-o'-shells but this joke, like "The Aristocrats," opens itself to some charming variations. N-NC is linked by Dog in New York City. Dog, though misnamed ("I happen to live in a liberal, college town in the Midwest"), is a treasure. The Fatal Bumper Sticker prompts the revelation that he once had this liberal friend...

I was a bit taken aback upon discovering that my friend had been pulled into the radical circles of the “artsy” Left...

...When it became clear that I did not share my friend’s and his cohort’s conviction that “America had it coming” and that 9/11 was our (i.e. Americans’) damn fault... he became vicious. From a friend he turned into a bitter and vindictive enemy... He demanded that I return all things that he ever gave me - which a promtly did; he kept sending me nasty letters, returning my responses without opening them, until I, too, stopped receiving his; he badmouthed me to our mutual friends (whom he eventually managed to alienate as well).

Dog is a former resident of Eastern Europe, where apparently friendships between males are a little more hysterical than we're used to.

Why can’t I see it as just an isolated incident - a single guy, perhaps mentally unstable, turning into a vindictive asshole because someone disagreed with him? It’s not a proof that the whole Left is like that! Of course, that’s what I thought for a while...

...and then he describes a reign of terror in his small Midwestern town by, it would appear, affluent, well-educated liberals who key cars and rip up lawn signs. Dog compares his life there unfavorably to his days in the Soviet bloc:

When I was still living under a totalitarian regime, one of my friends remarked bitterly: “When you are afraid of criminals, you can always go to the police for protection. But when you’re afraid of the police, who do you go to - criminals?” I did not know than that there existed a lower circle of Hell, one in which you have to be afraid of your co-workers, neighbors, friends, and people you pass on the street.

Dog's circle of Hell is similar to that of other folks who talk a lot about how badly they fit into whatever community they have inexplicably chosen: Dante called it "Il Hilarioso."