NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY. We must be getting close to pulling out of Iraq: the New York Post today stacked up two articles explaining that the situation is hopeless, and that this is all the Iraqis’ fault.

John Podhoretz has inherited his father’s annoying habit of numerating wars that do not exist. Podhoretz fils explains that “This is the Third Iraq War, and the most striking aspect of it is that it doesn’t involve us.” The American troops currently stationed there might think differently, but only because they’re not seeing the big picture: Podhoretz says this Third Iraq War, in which we are not involved, “may be the one we’re going to lose.” Gasp, a paradox! Clearly, these/this Iraqi war(s) exist(s) on such an exalted philosophical plane that your average dogface couldn’t be expected to understand.

Podhoretz fully acknowledges a coming civil war in Iraq, but judges that it has nothing to do with us invading the country, bombing the shit out of it, and substituting for its corrupt but functional leadership a plywood shack of pseudo-governance. No, it’s only happening because the Sunnis are “crazy.” The evidence is that “they seem determined to start a civil war they can only lose.” The idea that desperate men in desperate circumstances might resort to extreme measures appears not to have occurred to Podhoretz, who, despite his deep involvement in World Wars II-IV and Iraq Wars I-III, has nonetheless managed to keep his cool.

Ultimately the message is that, “If the Sunnis and the Shiites really go at it… if Iraq wants to commit suicide in this manner,” it’s not our fault or even our concern: “the answer ultimately lies with the Iraqi people.” So the country may descend into even more hellish violence and misery – but Mission Accomplished, because we won Iraq Wars I and II at least, and two out of three ain’t bad!

Below Podhoretz, Rich Lowry, a war fan from way back and author of National Review’s now-legendary WE’RE WINNING cover story, now chides his Commander-in-Chief for ever thinking he could democratize these bloody wogs in the first place: “The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to be not true.” Now you tell us!

According to Lowry, Middle Easterners aren’t ready for freedom or democracy – it has something to do with “the Fall” of Adam and Eve, whose sin affected Arabs much more than it did us white people. But though Bush is dead wrong, Lowry says, “this doesn’t mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy.”

Why not? Why persist in such a course if you don’t believe it can work? Shh, don’t disturb the analysis! Properly constructed and given time, it will so confuse the electorate that they will not realize the ignominy of our failure and the foolhardiness of our plan. Maybe we’ll even have our troops march backwards out of Iraq, so it won’t look like withdrawal. By the time people figure out what’s happened, we’ll be at war with Syria and/or Iran.

That will be a true victory – and, for this lot, the only kind that counts.

EASY RIDERS. This Times article about guys who stop working is very funny in places. For example, there is the case of Alan Beggerow, who maintains his life of ease by convincing his wife to work so he won't be forced to do just any old thing. A former warehouseman, Beggerow allows as how he would accept employment as a professional author.

If I had Mr. Beggerow's skill with the ladies, my novel would be coming along a lot faster. Or maybe it would be indefinitely delayed.

The article's bloviations about trends which Mr. Beggerow and his fellow slackers allegedly represent adds greatly to the humor. Work evaders are described as "unmoored"; a sociologist surmises that in this our modern age "men don’t feel a need to be in a career," etc.

Was I kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to a planet where everyone is a college professor? Because in the world I used to live in, most people work because they have to, not as a journey of personal fulfillment to be pursued or interrupted according to shimmerings of the zeitgeist. And when they don't have to work -- when they have enough money to get away with it, or find a sucker to support them -- they stop.

Funny as the article is, though, it has been topped by the analysis of Dr. Mrs. Perfesser, who thinks these easy riders are slacking as an expression of male resentment toward feminists ("Why should we be surprised that men are opting out of their masculine role as provider when 'experts' and feminists have been trashing this role for years?").

As is her custom, Dr. Mrs. P has some entertainingly crazy commenters:

It's high time MEN got the easier, more rewarding side of things.

Working is stressful, unrewarding, and takes years off of your life. When you come home to a partner who has done about 3 or 4 hours of work when you've done 8 or 9, plus commuting, and to kids who run and cry to your partner for every need whim and desire, it's apparant that the worker is undervalued...
(Not my PERSONAL experiences, but others I know. I intend to make my life my own.)

I love that final note. Next up:

What a rotten generation you must live in.

An interesting Psychological Phenomena has been occuring here in leafy suburbia; when the wife relaunches a carreer after on average 11 years off, because her "clock" has given her "Babies Rabies", and now Mr. "Provider" is "between jobs", All the SuperDad performance in the world doesn't make up for the feelings people are surprised they have when he does an excellent job as "Mr. Mom" and she as "Ms. Stud, the Provider"...

He reports (or should I say, "Reports") on five bitches of his acquaintance who tried to be "Ms. Stud" and got what was coming to them. Others are content to wait upon the verdict of history:

Look, Moslem cultures have real contempt for females: THAT is a major problem. Our western culture does not as of yet have that level of contempt for males, but bet everything you own and everything you will ever own that we are headed in that direction.

Before long the commenters are talking to people who aren't there:

So yes, Mrs Athanasius, the first move is open to the women and that movement should be in the direction of picking up what members of your gender have abandoned--your authentic vocation. If they do not, the consequences are clear. When the social experiment we are currently in collapses, by virtue of the experiment, the men will be coarser then they ever were, the women will be subjugated and constricted to a level never seen before...

And:

Mommy, you whore, I'm through.

I wonder if Dr. Mrs. Perfesser gets psychiatric clients this way. If so, at this rate the Perfesser will be able to take it easy soon enough.

VALLEY GIRL. Here's a Cathy Seipp article in her best Althouse-for-Angelenos tradition. She tells us that "[Mel] Gibson probably can be fairly described as right-wing," except by the Los Angeles Times, in which case it is a "non-sequitur." Then she tells us "knee-jerk anti-Semitism is now far more commonly found on the Left than on the Right," a charge she defends with exactly two anecdotes, one in which the Leftist blood libel is about "tourism" (there's an angle Der Sturmer missed!) and another in which a guy in a coffee shop blames Israel for the first Gulf War. (The guy's liberal credentials are "a blond ponytail" and involvement with a film crew, two members of which disagree with him; presumably they are not liberals, as no further ponytails are mentioned.)

There is also mention of "commenters at some lefty blog" deriding a previous Seipp article -- presumably commenters to my own post, because who else would bother? As you may recall, that earlier Seipp story was all about how Los Angeles liberals are obsessed with their area codes -- an accusation supported, again, by anecdotes, and one piece of on-record testimony: that of the famous ultra-liberal Mickey Kaus. This classic ended with the line, "And if the rest of those liberal [area code] 310 elites can’t get in touch with the rest of us, their elections will continue to be as lost as their area codes."

A good laugh all around. Seipp, however, thinks we were just laughing to keep from crying:

I can always tell when these things hit home because the lefties start flailing about with odd accusations — in this case that I’m one of those “gated conservatives” (Silver Lake’s a gated community?); that the West Side is “actually quite conservative” anyway (I guess so, if you define “quite conservative” as “overwhelmingly registered Democrats”); and that, of course, I have no liberal friends.

The truth is that because I live in L.A., most of my friends are liberal, just like if I lived in Rome most would be Roman. Unlike those tolerant Lefties, I don’t limit my friends to people who share my political opinions.

If Seipp is able to have friends who are liberals, while Lefties "limit [their] friends to people who share [their] political opinions," one of the following corollaries must obtain:

1. Liberals and Lefties are not the same thing, and Lefties cannot be friends with liberals because Stalin said no or something.
2. Liberals and Lefties are the same thing, and Seipp, by some osmotic process, is able to be friends with liberals without liberals being friends with her.

Which is it? I eagerly await your deranged comments.

CONSERVATIVE BLOG STRATEGY EXPLAINED: "I would, for a price, go sit in a movie theater crowd and cue the flow of laughter on the subtler jokes. I would, for a price, eat in a restaurant and make slightly audible favorable comments about the menu and, with a co-worker, contribute a pleasant sound of conversation and even make up gossip about fictional characters to give the other diners something to eavesdrop on. Or maybe I should just start a business, designing jobs like this and selling businesses on the notion that they need fake patrons to improve the attitude of the real patrons." -- Ann Althouse

ANCIENT ENMITIES. Jeff Jarvis is upset that Columbia J-School Dean Nicholas Lemann called out bloggers who herald the demise of the hated MSM. For starters, Jarvis says no blogger has ever argued such a thing:

[Lemann's] strawman king: that bloggers believe they will replace journalists. I don’t know a single blogger who says that with a straight face.

In general Jarvis is right: it's mainly mainstream media figures themselves who make such pronouncements. Like Peggy Noonan ("The MSM rose because it had a monopoly. And it fell because it lost that monopoly"), Newsweek's Howard Fineman ("A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the 'mainstream media'..."), and of course the unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) journalists quoted by the Ole Perfesser.

In fact, factoring out the bottom-feeders, the only mainstream blogger I can find overtly predicting the imminent death of the MSM is Jeff Jarvis:

If I owned a newspaper, I’d sell it, wouldn’t you? If I were Yahoo, would I buy it? Maybe only Yahoo and Google could consolidate the advertising marketplace to make big media work still.

...What we’re seeing, I’ll say again, is just the dinosaurs huddling against the cold of the internet ice age. The poor, old, lumbering beasts have to stick together.

Jarvis liked his dinosaur line so much he repeated it for a Washington Post discussion, which perhaps counts as another MSM-on-death-of-MSM cite. (And come to think of it, didn't Jarvis used to write for TV Guide?)

Jarvis' main point is that journalism has been and will be deeply affected -- not to say herded onto the ice caps -- by the new breed of "citizen journalists":

I so wish I had seen [Lemann] instead imagine the possibilities for news when journalists and bloggers join to work together in a network made possible by the internet. I wish he had seen journalism expanded way past the walls of newsrooms and j-schools to gather and share more information for an informed society...

We live, as ever, in flux, and tomorrow never knows, though Jarvis' blog creditably follows the trends and notes the markers of journalism's digital future.

But let us cut the crap. The general trend of our media criticism, online and off, is and has been for some time neither technological nor futuristic but political -- a concerted attack on the famed "liberal media," a hydra-headed beast so insidiously powerful that it has managed to deliver the White House to its Democratic overlords in all but seven of the past ten Presidential elections.

Such attacks go back to Spiro Agnew -- at least in the popular imagination; or, if one takes the long view, to Robert Welch. In either case, they far precede the golden dawn of blogspot.

When Jarvis' more modern citizen journalists have attacked the MSM, they have done so with charges that seek to discredit its liberal-identified reports -- successfully, as with Rathergate, or less so, as with Haditha. We are a long, long way from the Trent Lott affair, and the bipartisan citizen-journalist comity it supposedly represented (though some of us, I override modesty to admit, knew better even then).

The key involvement of Hugh Hewitt in Jarvis' expanded discussion and citation of the point is an indicator of this: Hewitt is a cheerful Republican operative, author of books with titles like If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It, whose interest in the subject of new media is not, to say the least, limited to a search for Higher Truth.

This connection stems from Lemann's own softball New Yorker profile of Hewitt last year, in which he described Hewitt as an "unlined, inquisitive-looking, forty-nine-year-old with an amiable but relentless manner." Lemann goes on: "Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece... he has no problem presenting himself as an active, loyal Republican -- so why won't people who work in the mainstream [media] own up to views that surely affect their work?" Watching Hewitt go to work on liberal apparatchik Dana Milbank (!), Lemann notes that "Hewitt does not, like Bill O'Reilly, become righteously indignant -- he's never confrontational, always friendly -- but he is persistent..."

Lemann conveys Hewitt's liberal-bias-conversion experience: "On Election Night in 2000, Hewitt told me, there were cheers in the [PBS affiliate KCET] studio every time a state went for Gore" -- though Lemann does acknowledge that Hewitt's colleagues at KCET remember it differently, as of course they would, being PBS affiliate employees who are not Hugh Hewitt. Lemann ends by observing that Republicans have "a wonderfully efficient message machine," and that "Democrats aren't going to beat them merely by streamlining the delivery of their message" -- whatever that might mean.

Assuming Lemann's liberal bias -- and how could we not? -- what a unusually, indeed strangely, generous portrayal this is; on a par with Time's Ann Coulter cover story. Given the hysterical terms of our current culture war, it seems almost suicidal; and, indeed, that is how it was taken.

Immdiately after its appearance, the New Yorker softball was gratefully acknowledged by Hewitt himself -- though Hewitt's archives are farblonjet since his Townhall absorption, we still have on record conservative website Powerline, which said, "The New Yorker has a profile of Hugh Hewitt by Nicholas Lemann, a liberal writer I admire. The profile apparently is not available online, but Hugh has reproduced the first and last paragraphs. They support his overall assesment -- 'a very fair but hard hitting piece.'"

In the days following that valentine, though, conservative journal Weekly Standard reported, "There is a new high priest in the dean's office on the seventh floor [of Columbia's Journalism School] - -Nicholas Lemann... Lemann began his [career] scribbling for a New Orleans alternative weekly..." Noting Lemann's arduous pursuit of a spot on the Harvard Crimson, the Standard remarked, "Lemann will need the same persistence if his legacy as dean is to be something other than a footnote in the history of the decline of American media power."

That piece was written by Hugh Hewitt. Citizen Journalist Mark Tapscott called it "fascinating and important." Citizen Journalist Austin Bay said "Lehman really has no answer for embedded ideology and narrow points of view." Many, many, many, many, many other Citizen Journalists (partial list) agreed.

In recent remarks on the Jarvis argument, Hewitt is more charitable toward Lemann, but still hoists a battle flag that precedes Blogger, RSS, and iPods:

Dean Lemann doesn't want to personalize the debate, and he's right not to. It isn't about his personal views or my personal views, but about what can objectively be said about MSM objectivity. Dean Lemann believes in the ideal and is trying to resurrect it. I believe the ideal never existed, but that even its best days are far behind us, and that the idea of MSM objectivity today is preposterous.

You want to know about the relationship of new media to old? Don't think of Markos; think of Spiro. And of countless wishy-washy types who thought they were being fair, but were merely being rolled.

UNSTOPPERED. I stopped paying attention to Tom Stoppard’s plays in the 80s. I’d like to say it was because I hadn’t time for the introductory seminars they increasingly seemed to require, but in fact it was because I figured I’d gotten the gist of him already -- sensible, witty people vs. nihilistic wreckers who are sometimes also witty; civilization either implicitly or explicitly in the balance – and I didn’t feel the need.

I have just read Stoppard’s Arcadia, which conforms to my horrible prejudice, but which I also enjoyed immensely. The play is split between an early-19th-century and a modern setting – in the early bit, Lord Byron lurks in shadow while a young prodigy seeks to harmonize the rigors of Newtonian physics with her budding love of life; in the modern bit, scholars squabble over their predecessors’ artifacts for position, recognition, and feelings of righteousness. The seminar we missed before the curtain was about math, statistics, chaos theory, etc., but the characters catch us up as best they can.

The historical forces implicated this time are the Enlightenment and the “Romantic Sham,” as it is put by Hannah, the play’s pivotal modern figure: “…a century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion… the decline from thinking to feeling, you see.”

In an ordinary stage comedy, this would be the set-up for a come-down – hot leading man melts cool heroine! -- but Stoppard’s admirable perversity has ever been to side with coolness over heat. So Hannah and her droll maybe-fiancee Valentine are shown to be on the right track, while her opposite number, Bernard, is shown to be not only an impulsive Byronic, but also a cad (Stoppard’s villains are always cads – cads, or bounders, or both) -- and objectively wrong to boot! (Again, a requirement for Stoppard villains whenever he can possibly manage it.)

So not much has changed – or had changed by the time he wrote this. (His new play, Rock and Roll, is in London now.) Except, while Stoppard was seemingly resigned to the victory of moral relativism in Jumpers, in Arcadia he is more optimistic. For an old crank, he takes surprising pleasure in technology -- it allows Valentine to develop the prodigy’s stillborn ideas on a computer. Also, it aligns with Hannah’s thoroughness in chasing down the truth, which is portrayed as an expansive, pro-human gesture – while the volcanic Bernard, despite his Romantic gush, is shown to be more or less anti-human. There you go – Stoppard the techno-triumphalist! I surprised he doesn’t have a blog,

Still, I like it. Shavian didacticism in the cause of theatricality is no vice. I was at first infuriated at all the math talk, but was won over as it developed into a poetic parallel to Hannah’s thinking. Hannah is never exactly torn (between Bernard’s rasher way of thought and life, and Valentine’s quietism, it’s clear where she’ll end up), so her conflict is never quite dramatic, but like Stoppard she is passionately interested in abstract things, and some of her heat – or slightly-less-coolness – rubs off on the viewer, or reader. It ain’t catharsis, but what is these days?

Also, Stoppard is funny, really funny, in a (to some of us) irresistibly British way. Take this 19th century exchange between Lady Croom and her landscape architect, who has devised for her estate, in the fashion of the times, a “hermitage”:

LADY CROOM: And who is to live in it?
NOAKES: Why, the hermit.
LADY CROOM: Where is he?
NOAKES: Madam?
LADY CROOM: You surely do not supply a hermitage without a hermit?
NOAKES: Indeed, Madam --
LADY CROOM: Come, come, Mr. Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have?
NOAKES: I have no hermits, my lady.
LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.
NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One might advertise.
LADY CROOM: Advertise?
NOAKES: In the newspapers.
LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

When you write that well, I guess you can make it about anything you like, can't you?

EMERGENCY! EVERYBODY TO GET FROM STREET! When Michael Totten refused to say that his old pals in Lebanon should be happy to get blown up, I was encouraged. But at last National Review has found someone who'll go where Totten wouldn't: "Lebanon-born Walid Phares":

Lopez: Is there really any hope that the Lebanese, in the long run, will understand why Israel had to bomb [them]?

Phares: First, consider what the Lebanese want. They are under tremendous pressures today, and they have multiple opinions about what has been happening to their country over the past decades...

I have to stop a moment. God, do I love that opening! My countrymen are faced with all sorts of dilemmas: which child to fall on top of when your house is blown to bits is just one of them.

...Simply put, they don’t see the link between the air strikes and their being able to get rid of Hezbollah once a cease fire takes effect. Many Lebanese we speak to, including politicians, social and spiritual leaders, NGOs, etc., tell us that they don’t understand what the relation is between taking out bridges in northern Lebanon or blowing up a manufacturing plant in Mount Lebanon and the disarming of Hezbollah.

Most Lebanese aren’t naïve; they try to understand the process, but no one is explaining it to them...

Maybe the Israelis will drop copies of this interview on Beirut before the next air strike. I can imagine, when the bombs hit, the last words of nearby non-combatants: "Well, you know, they make a good point."

UPDATE. Apparently Israeli psy-ops are "sending text messages to mobile phones and voice messages saying their war was against Hezbollah and not the Lebanese people." UR NT WHO I WANT 2 KILL! H'Z'B'L IS! DUCK!!!! ROTFLMAO!!!

I HAVE A BAD COLD AND I'M TIRED, SO I'M GRATEFUL THAT THIS POST WROTE ITSELF FOR ME:

If I were a Democrat, I'd support Joe Lieberman next week...
-- Andrew Sullivan

I wonder if it's too late for Lamont to put this in his advertising.

P.S. If I were a Republican -- hey, wait a minute: I am!

BUT THERE I GO, CONFUSING ART AND POLITICS AGAIN. A lot of really awful stuff has been written about the Mel Gibson episode, so I guess Ann Althouse was bound to get in on it:

My point is that what [O.J.] Simpson (presumably) did doesn't change the meaning of the achievements that made him a big star. Gibson, on the other hand, has revealed something loathsome about his mind that affects our interpretation of the works of art that sprang from that mind. In particular, it changes "The Passion of the Christ," which had to be defended at the time of its release from charges that it is anti-Semitic.

I've criticized Ann Althouse's lava-lamp aesthetics before, but this idea -- that works of art can be retroactively invalidated by the misbehavior of their creators -- is less entertainingly psychedelic.

I wonder if Professor Althouse has ever read and enjoyed H.L. "Prehensile Kikes" Mencken, Philip "Too Many Fucking Niggers About" Larkin, the Mussolini propagandist Ezra Pound, the Nazi collaborator Celine*, the Stalinist Brecht, or any other great artists whose personal views she does not endorse. If so, how can she still enjoy them, knowing of their thoughtcrimes?

Gibson's nowhere near their league, in my book, and I was only lukewarm on his Jesus movie, seeing less anti-Semitism in it than belligerent self-pity. But though his public downfall is well-deserved and hilarious, I wouldn't let it touch my view of his art, any more than I would refuse to drive a Volkswagen because of its associations with the Third Reich.

UPDATE. Great comments. Aimai pinpoints the Althouse issue:

...If she'd defended the original work on its artistic merits she wouldn't have to retract -- but she specifically defended it on its political merits as 'not anti-semitic.' Now she has to give up one or the other pose.

Usually, people who misuse works of art as identity bracelets, protest signs, bulwarks against indecency, etc., never discover their error (though they may over time develop contempt for art because it doesn't do very well what they think it's supposed to do). The Gibson incident offers a rare chance to see these people directly confronted with the folly of their approach. Althouse feels betrayed; this internet genius actually gets the question right, but can't shake off the political analogies (or Woody Allen, liberal defiler of youth). Watching him struggle with this is great fun -- like watching a monkey trying to figure out a violin. (In fact he gets so worked up that, in the end, he has to think of Andrew Sullivan in order to get his mind off it.)

If we had decent arts and humanities curricula in our high schools, this wouldn't be happening.

*I take GeoX's point that there is no evidence of what we'd consider collaboration by Celine, though the French did find him guilty of it.

BAY OF PIG.

I really, really, really hope this administration has a good plan to take advantage of Castro's — tragic! That's right tragic! — demise. Undoubtedly, there are 20 kajillion old plans sitting on a shelf somewhere. But a little democracy-spreading on Castro's grave would be a welcome change of pace considering the news these days. No, I don't want any invasions or whatnot, but maybe some walking-around money and some threats would work nicely. It's not my job to work out the details. It's my job to hope that someone else has — very late on a Monday night.

It is my custom at this point to say "This is the stupidest thing Jonah Goldberg has ever written, and will remain so until he writes something else" -- but actually I don't know if he can top this one. It's so catastrophically dumb that, when I showed it to some single-celled organisms, they rolled their nuclei at it.

SHORTER CHRISTOPHER CHANTRILL. The Seattle shooting was the direct result of liberals and their damned Civil Rights Act.

MAD SCIENTIST. The recent discussion of parenting at The Corner reaches a watershed of hilarity in remarks by that great man of science, Charles Murray:

There is an interesting question in all this: Does Dad actually have to be alive to accomplish all this? There's an interesting study to be done of the sons of dads killed in war, or absent for some other honorable reason. Is it enough for Mom to be able to say "Your father would be very proud of you" or "Your father would be very disappointed in you"? I prefer to think no; that we're more useful alive and present. But it would still be an interesting study...

I love that "honorable reason" and can imagine Murray's reseachers assigning honor values to various paternal absences. Maybe if Paw went to jail for bombing an abortion clinic, the lad will get a "well-raised in absentia" rating. But what if Father just had a heart attack? No doubt inquiries will have to be made to establish that it was an honorable heart attack -- such as one induced by long consumption of American fatty foods.

As to Derb's question: can the right-hand tail of the distribution, the super-involved parents, who get just the right mobile to hang over the baby's crib, schedule every enhancing intellectual and physical activity, etc. etc., make things worse? I have no data, but I cringe every time I watch such parents at work. If I had to assign my children to be adopted, I'd prefer any ordinarily loving blue-collar couple with no college education and low income over a pair of Super Parents.

A touching sop to the working class! The youngster will learn the value of hard work in our society by watching his folks make a quart of milk last seven days. At least he will be spared excess fussing over his mobiles. There's a son or daughter Charles Murray can be proud of -- in absentia, and honorably.

Why do I get the feeling that all these lunatics were raised in Skinner boxes?

"GODFATHER III: GOOD VERSION." I never saw Godfather III before this weekend, having been advised by everyone in the civilized world that it sucked. Lately, though, I'd felt an urge to finally get through the trilogy. Maybe it's because I've grown older and gained a little more patience -- or desire to be patient, anyway -- with long-distance artists. I just knocked back #2 in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, and am steeling myself to read #3, not because The Manticore psyched me for it, but because I have developed a superstitious feeling about leaving such things unfinished.

G3 reaches back into the saga's first two parts, and the cinematography, sets, and costumes are a nearly seamless match. As before, they are not only impeccably of their time and place, but deeply imaginative and expressive of the psychology of both scene and character. In the big Corleone party at the beginning, there's a lot of brown and burgundy, velvet and flounces, in spacious but visually overheated rooms: a modern Medici feast. Sicily is a tropical backwater scorched to near-barrenness, the Vatican a labyrinth. And Michael is dressed impeccably but slightly loosely -- to accommodate his Richard III hump, and to suggest a man close to death.

Coppola makes some good use of the franchises' stored-up riches. When he shock-cuts from familiar Corleone environs to the neon sign of the China Bowl, or has Elvis Costello's "Miracle Man" blast from the windows of Michael's Sicilian villa, the thrilling sense of dislocation reminds us how deliriously inventive Coppola can be. (In fact, I'll go further: it reminds me of Scorsese.)

The acting, with one major exception, is perfect. Two of the veterans are sublime. The development of Talia Shire's Connie is organic and chilling: the cowering wife of G1 becomes a terrifying Electra. And Diane Keaton launches her acting renaissance with increasing layers of justification for her relationship with Michael. The new guys are great: Eli Wallach is Tuco resurrected as a Mafia Don, and Joe Mantegna puts spit in John Gotti's polish.

Sofia Coppola's performance is a common object of ridicule, but I find her suprisingly effective. She is, by Hollywood standards -- well, I guess the best word in English is ungainly -- her teeth and lips are badly out of sync, her nose is prominent, and her collegiate drawl has all the simplicity of youth without its charm. (I think she's cute, but I'm a big perv.) But she is believably a great man's daughter (no shock) and her lack of acting skill translates on-screen as a lack of guile -- which makes her attractiveness to Vinny (a brilliant update of young Jimmy Caan by Andy Garcia) more poignant than a more conventional starlet might have suggested. Vinny is Sonny Corleone's bastard son, and he identifies deeply with the Corleone family; his desire for Coppola's Mary is almost sickly familial: his romantic pet name for her is "Cuz." Coppola is clearly in love with him, and Garcia, with seeming romantic innocence, gobbles up her wan screen presence, which suits his character, his circumstance, and Michael's objections.

As in the sublime Godfather II, Coppola wants us to understand what Michael Corleone understands: that the further the Corleones rise, the more crooked things get. He also wants us to understand something Michael never understands: that the desire to rise must destroy. G1, Michael's story, and G2, Coppola's, are the bookends of a tragic vision -- arguably the closest thing to an American tragedy since O'Neill.

What then is G3 for? What is its connection to the first two films; how does it magnify their power or settle their debts?

I can see why Coppola would want to tackle the Vatican Bank/JP1 scandal. In the go-go era in which the film was made, it may have seemed natural for the Corleones to globalize. And, giving Coppola extra credit, that circumstance also gives an opportunity to resuscitate an important character trait of Michael's: his belief that he and his family are different -- that when he wins, it is something more than a tribal victory.

If Michael were merely a competent successor to his father, the Godfather saga would just be another story of a Local Hood who Makes Good -- a version of all our other great gangster stories, only without retribution. But in his youth Michael went to great lengths to evade his family's business, and when family ties finally proved too strong for him, he yet held onto the one part of his father's dream that served his deeper self -- "I never meant this for you... Senator Corleone... maybe even... "

The Kennedy parallel has always been screamingly obvious in the Godfather saga, and one of its great insights has been that a man might dare anything in pursuit of power without relinquishing one conviction: that he and his are yet something better than the most successful brutes in the jungle. Michael's comments on the harsh realities of power -- "Who's being naive, Kay?" -- were never signs of acceptance so much as of contempt. Michael swallowed the corruption of the world without ever believing that it applied to him.

But the Michael of G3 is not capable of showing us this, and it's not just the writing that makes it so. I love Al Pacino, but I think he got boxed in here. At the end of G2 Michael was nearly a living sepulchre: so hardened around his idea of power that he'd lost most of his capacity to express feelings. That was a brilliant performance, referring back to the opacity of Brando's Don, but it left Pacino with no emotional wiggle room for any future Michael Corleone performance -- and in G3 Coppola not only drags him into the future, but visits upon him several emotional extremities designed to expose that weakness. You can almost see Pacino struggling with his strait-jacket; only in a Lear-like explosion after the Atlantic City massacre can he release the deep frustrations of his character, and Coppola perversely films the scene in medium shot with a thunderstorm drowning out much of his ravings. Even when he re-courts Kay in Sicily, Pacino looks like Boris Karloff as The Mummy.

With Michael thus diminished, the international and Sicilian intrigues are allowed to overwhelm him and the story. The widening gyre of corruption expands only itself: the Corleones remain in a small, incestuous knot at the center. All that separates their final agon from any other drive-by resulting from petty blood-feuds is our familiarity with the characters, and despite their copious histrionics, and our sentimental attachments, it's not enough.

"I wanted the film to end as a tragedy... sort of like Hamlet or something," Coppola says in the DVD commentary. He adds, referring to Welles' Magnificent Ambersons, "Michael Corleone got his comeuppance." Coming from a mature artist, that sounds rather feeble. Better to understand that Michael hit the wall in 1962, and that the curtain drawn on him then should stay closed.

ALTHOUSE UPDATE! Edroso was hypocritical to see political imputations in what Althouse wrote about T.C. Boyle, because she doesn't impute politics -- Edroso does! Plus, "the political vision of the left... feels like depression."

Maybe it's just the manic phase talking, but I think that with some effort I can work some better pull-quotes out of this whole thing.

IRREMEDIABLE READING. In a 2003 column, Josh Marshall argued that managing post-war Iraq -- given the limited war our Administration had planned for that country ("the loss of civilian life in Iraq will be minimal. Certainly, we all hope so") -- might be difficult: "Doing that in a foreign country may require a mauling of the civilian population that we are rightly unwilling to undertake."

Oho, says the Ole Perfesser, snapping his suspenders, so Mr. Marshall was worried that we weren't killing enough Iraqis! Then he looks at the jury, touches the side of his nose, and ambles on back to his table.

Marshall objects, and the Perfesser rejoins: perhaps if his learned colleague had objected when the Perfesser previously got it all fucked up, we wouldn't be settin' here today!

The Perfesser then offers a new piece of evidence on his own behalf: the testimony of Armed Liberal, who says that when Marshall reported the recent attack at a Seattle Jewish center, he updated with a note from a correspondent angry that Marshall wasn't comparing it to a 1994 attack on Palestinians ("The emails we get" added Marshall) -- showing Marshall is engaged in the same "moral equivalence" his commenter complained he wasn't engaging in.

The Perfesser rests his case! And the cuspidor rings in triumph.

I spent several hours today teaching kids how to read better. Maybe we can save that generation, anyway.

WHITE GUYS HAVE NAMES LIKE "LENNY," AND BLACK GUYS HAVE NAMES LIKE "CARL." The "Why Choco-mut Ice Creams Is Conservative" column of the week -- a designation we will consider making official -- is by Cathy Seipp, who tells us stupid liberals care too much about their area codes in Los Angeles. Conversely, Seipp only cares enough to write a lengthy, retch-inducing column about the alleged phenomenon. The punchline:

And if the rest of those liberal 310 elites can’t get in touch with the rest of us, their elections will continue to be as lost as their area codes.

Do you think they even have editors at NRO? I think maybe there's an old schooldesk somewhere on the premises, behind which Goldberg has placed a blow-up doll from one those infamous Goucher frat parties, with a tie clumsily placed around its neck and a sign reading EDITER taped to its chest. "Oh, but now you can't see her tits!" I can image Goldberg complaining as he gazes upon his handiwork; shifting unsteadily in place, one brown loafer half off his foot, Goldberg gestures wanly with his beer bottle, once, twice; the intern, still holding the tape dispenser, wonders if under her clothes Ann Coulter smells like raw hot dogs.

UPDATE. Thematically related Hit & Run post by Kerry Howley, on the culture scold Suzanne Fields: "Is there a tank somewhere with balls labeled 'Vagina Monologues,' 'college hook-ups,' and 'Girls Gone Wild'? Are these columns composed with magnetic poetry?"

LE GAI SAVOIR. There's a chance that, being sane people with healthy priorities, you folks will never of your own volition go to the Ann Althouse site, and might not go even if I linked to it; so in an educational spirit I will reproduce here one of her best posts ever:

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite."

Said Howard Dean:

"We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah."

So it's the usual anti-war position, with a new spike of rhetoric... that doesn't seem likely to appeal to anyone.

I mean, because, like, um, oh look, a pretty rock!

Professor Althouse's breezy, dismissive style is at its zenith here, but this is not just about great style, but also about amnesia. Since the start of the World War Whatever: Return to Lebanon, conservative bloggers have been busting leftist chops over their less-than-total-and-unqualified support of Israel -- often in the "I don't think criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic, but..." manner. In fact, Althouse herself was giving the folks at Daily Kos a hard time about that just a few days ago.

Now our Government brings in for a speech to Congress Nouri al-Maliki, the PM of our other best friends in the Middle East, and al-Maliki says not one word about how much he supports the plucky little Israelis -- certainly because he doesn't support them, and because our Government let him get away with it. (I'd love to have seen those negotitations: "And we would like you to express your support for Israel." "Those pig-dogs of monkeys, may they rot in hell!" "Okay -- how about you just don't say anything about Israel?")

Our second ally in the region won't speak up for our first, and suddenly the "Say it, say you love Israel!" routine these guys have been pulling stateside is suspended, and they're all cool with nuance and realism. The Ole Perfesser shrugs: at least al-Maliki's not Kofi Annan! Even She-Wolf Michelle Malkin has nothing to say about al-Maliki's lack of Israel ardor, saving her rage for the "Hugo Chavez groupie" who heckled him.

These guys have been having it both ways for so long that simple logical connections no longer even occur to them. The punchline is, many of them are law professors.

LAME AS IT EVER WAS. Some chatter at The Corner as to whether keyboard kommandos are actually "fighting" the War on Whatever. Cliff May comes up with an interesting affirmation:

There is a war of arms. And there is a war of ideas.

They are not just inter-related, they are interdependent. They are equally consequential. When we get the ideas wrong, when we misunderstand the problem, we end up with the wrong solution and all that follows from that.

Let’s take just one example: In the 1930s, Churchill fought a war of ideas...

Blah blah o fucking blah, snip.

This defeat in the war of ideas led to a conflagration unlike any before, in which tens of millions were killed.

So yes, Kathryn, you are fighting a war. And your e-mailer is ignorant about how wars are fought, about how wars are won and lost, and about the way the world actually works.

Try to imagine The Corner as The Roundabout -- a series of telegraph messages sent among like-minded individuals in pre-war Britain:

GOOD FOR FRANCO [Clifford Mayfair]
Bloody good show in Tereul, it won't be long now. True Britons will rejoice at the impending doom of the so-called "Republican" cause. Damned scruffy lot, rife with poets and whores. And think of all that Moscow gold wasted! Ha ha! Some of us will be having drinks at the Club to celebrate.

MORE SHIRT-LIFTERS APPREHENDED [Stanley Curtis]
Several deviants discovered in flagrante in a Wessex loo last night. No Peers among them in this case, thank heaven; my long war against sodomy is clearly bearing fruit among opinion leaders. Doubtless these Bunburyists will feel the full force of the law, as well they should, for this is single greatest danger facing our Empire.

OSWALD'S A CORKER [John Derbyshire]
The politically correct will be outraged, but old Mosely was in great form at a 'do' for the BUF last night, attended by myself. The good-natured joshing of our Hebrew brethren would no doubt have raised hackles among our intelligentsia, but for me that is the cream of the jest. Oswald told me several stories about his friend Goebbels, who seems a right sort. Why our Government so oppresses the poor man when there are so many shirt-lifters and three-wheelers about is beyond me.

MR. CHRRRRRRRISTIAN! [John Gold]
Have you ever noticed that Stanley Baldwin bears a striking resemblance to Oliver Hardy, the film comedian? Well, if Baldwin had a mustache and weighed a few more stone, I mean. I am aware that Miss Lopeshire has banned all references to the cinema, though I would counter that I'm trying to make a serious point about political drift in Britain. But anyway it's late and I have an omnibus to catch.

In any "war of ideas," the Cornerites represent a battalion of spitballers.

CRUNCHY CONS GO DOWNMARKET. I see that Rod Dreher has moved his Crunchy Con blog to Beliefnet. Time has not been kind to his movement, and it seems the come-down in venue has made Dreher more anxious to boost his conservative niche brand into the big time: he's talking less now about the relation of medieval theology to organic food, and more about gay toilet sex:

...a gay Republican male -- very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll -- told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar"...

...what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?... it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture...

Yeah, the media never asks Elton John if he likes it up the ass in a crapper. (Maybe Dreher's gay Republican friend can do a special report on Fox!)

Most of Dreher's recent posts are about your basic culture-war bullshit -- like how kids don't say sir or ma'am no more (especially when they's raised by New York bitches!), or how no one takes time to be pals anymore (and neither does Dreher -- oh well, that's life! Bye!) -- or standard-issue conservative belligerence: posts about how Israel must kill more, we must kill more, here is one of God's creatures I really want to die, etc. Not much here about Heraclitus or wheat germ.

Apparently the Crunchy book didn't summon an army of Ned Flanderses, marching with a cross in one hand and a bucket of Seven Stars yogurt in the other, so Dreher's going back to being a ordinary pain in the ass.

MOW-RON OF THE MOMENT -- FIRST IN A SERIES! Busy, no time; will post short bits, clowns & dumbbells, no details. Out of context? You decide!

Our first genius:

This seems to be at the root of the libertarian and liberal allegation, in my non-legally-educated mind. In their ever-present desire to condemn the Administration, they presume that those who do know the program best are willing accomplices to the undermining of the nation. I could perhaps accept this explanation if so many people were not involved, but that is not the reality of the situation.

Give it up for Confederate Yankee! And watch this space!