FIELDERS: CHOICE. Jeff Weaver and Tom Glavine were great tonight. So were both bullpens. But it was gloves what won it. Carlos Beltran doubling Pujols off first from the outfield took the juice out of St. Lou early, and Adny or Endy or Inky or whatever-it-is Chavez' sno-cone catch in the fifth kept the tarp nailed down tight. The infield was impermeable. Even Willie Randolph, who looks in all interviews now like he's being grilled by cops, spoke up for the defense in the post-game. Beltran's homer was a rare moment of batter confidence, and all we needed.

Fox 5 coverage from the Shea parking lot tonight made we wish badly I could be out there. Mets fans are spectacularly stoopid. They don't have the confidence of Yankees rooters, and their enthusiasm is more retarded and untelegenic. To paraphrase Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch: They're mooks, and I wish to God I was with them. (Sign of the night: CARDINALS TASTE LIKE CHICKEN.)

I'm beginning to love Tom Glavine. I hated him, of course, when he was Brave and affectlessly whipping our asses year after year. But at the butt-end of his career, waiting on win number 300, Glavine was The Professional, blandly blotting out rallies and walking off the field like he had just cut a man's throat in an alley and didn't want anyone to look at him. He's a nice counterweight to drama queens like Wright and Reyes.

I'm still nervous. We really have only three starters, and sooner or later the middle relief is going to resemble a five-car pileup on the BQE. And if we get to the Series, I suspect the Tigers will be as strong and supple as their namesakes. But I'm happy to have the opportunity to fret.

BULLSHIT LIBERTARIANS. "Listen, I'm a small-government conservative. When New York banned all smoking in public places, I protested. When they came for foie gras in Chicago, I ridiculed. But when Mayor Bloomberg proposed banning trans fats in New York City restaurants, I murmured: 'Gee, is that really so bad?'" -- Maggie Gallagher.

So, "small-government conservative" is pretty much a synonym for "hypocrite," right?

Or, to elaborate, whenever somebody who evinces a strong smell of conservatism starts talking about his libertarian cred -- like this guy, who declares himself "a conservative-libertarian hybrid" while denouncing gay marriage ("Just because something is immoral does not mean that it should be legal") -- hide your freedoms.

You probably have your own favorite bullshit libertarians. Here's mine, at the moment: a self-indentified "libertarian conservative" who says "Where I part company with many libertarians is that I find them too doctrinaire." One of those doctrines is apparently the fallacy that black people are not inferior to whites: "...people of African ultimate origin do have much lower average scores on general problem-solving ability (IQ) than do people of European ancestry and... variations in IQ are largely genetic." Or maybe that part's his libertarian side. With these folks it's hard to tell.

I'd love to hear other contenders. Please remember, however, that the Ole Perfesser already has his own wing in the BL Hall of Fame.

HALF BAKED. 'Member when, in Star Trek? They scrambled up their molecules? And they could go from one place to the other, like, through the air?

What I realized in thinking about this is the extent to which modern nation-states are all about geometry: They have an inside, and an outside, and the presumption is that if most of the dangers are kept outside everything will be fine. If some sort of practical matter transportation came about, we'd have to think about a different way of looking at things: The "virtual geography" of transport connections would mean more than the real geography of rivers, mountains, oceans, and other formerly important natural barriers. That seems pretty revolutionary.

Dude, chill, they haven't even invented telespre-- telepreta-- tel-e-por-ta-tion yet. Hey, did you eat all the Fritos?

UPDATE. "Virtual communities in some ways already mean more than real ones..." ("You do have friends, don't you?" "Well... the Superfriends.")

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE. When YouTube wouldn't show her video, Michelle Malkin went into her customary dhimmitude froth. But the right wing's brightest lights have adopted a less manic approach: they're promoting the Zucker parody ad by making it seem like forbidden fruit:

Don't show this ad!
Noooooo! It wouldn't be nice! Must be niiiiiiiiiice. So they're not showing it, and it's a good thing no one can see it.
...
I AGREE WITH ANN ALTHOUSE: It's a good thing that nobody is showing this ad. It's a regular triumph of good taste that it's not being shown anywhere at all. . . .

Though I'm glad I got to watch Kim Jong Il slam-dunking, even if it was in a commercial that no one at all will ever see. Because, you know, they're not showing it anywhere.

Of course, the ad's lack of network presence is not due to evil MSM censorship, but because the Republican Party correctly figured voters would see it and think, "So, Clinton and that fat lady -- are they running for something?"

I think the ad's pretty funny -- but it's no Daisy!

UPDATE. Now Stanley Kurtz is doing it, too. Ugh. When they try this hard to be cute, they remind me of Samuel L. Jackson dancing for Ruby Dee in Jungle Fever.

AND IF PRINCESS LEIA AND I COULD HANG OUT, I BET SHE WOULD REALLY LIKE ME. Steven Den Beste, blowhardiest of legacy bloggers, mocks liberals as dreamers who retreat into fantasy worlds of entertainment programming:

Lose the 2000 election? Well, create a TV show where the Democrats actually won in 2000. Wish Hillary would win, but fear that she won't? Make another TV show about the first woman (a Democrat, naturally) to be President. Want the War on Terror to end? Just write the history of the future and and have a future President (a woman) end it. Hate George Bush, and wish he was gone? Then make a movie about his assassination.

Meanwhile, the official weblog of National Review magazine is devoting itself to a protracted discussion of Battlestar Gallactica and other sci-fi dorkery. Specimen:

I hear ya. And, let's also acknowledge that the whole "We come in peace" storyline is hardly new to sci-fi. But, come on. It seems an enormous stretch to think that the producers were going for occupied France first and Iraq second. The whole suicide bombing thing, the one-eyed Tighe, etc made the comparisons to Iraq incredibly ham-fisted. Indeed, what's annoying is that the French resistance vibe people are getting is part of what makes the Iraq comparison so offensive. It's a one-step remove from comparing the Iraqi insurgency to the (romanticized) French resistance.

Try to imagine this speech yammmered by young Jonah at a Goucher coed, and punctuated by the crunching of Cheetos.

Everyone likes a good fantasy. But the major difference between them and us is, we indulge our fantasies by creating film and TV shows, whereas they indulge theirs by creating unnecessary wars.

Also, they smell really, really bad.

MORE RINGING ENDORSEMENTS OF BUSH NORTH KOREA POLICY ROLL IN! "...we may be left with no choices other than war and blackmail." -- "Captain" Ed Morrissey

I bet they're tickled that this pushed Foley off the front page! Now, instead of looking like teen-sex enablers, the Republicans look like our unsmiling concierges to the Apocalypse. Much more mediagenic!

Meanwhile, Mario Loyola (whom I imagine as a young Andy Garcia in the first half of The Godfather III, a hot-tempered enforcer ready to start stabbing at the slightest nod from his boss) is going the "It's all Clinton's fault" route. The die-hards' portrayal of the former President has become over-complicated, though: it's hard to envision even the Clenis killing real Americans at Ruby Ridge and Waco, running drugs through the Mena Airport, selling us out in Darfur, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and getting his dick sucked all at the same time. If I were they, just before blowing my brains out, I would try to offload some of these atrocities onto a different straw man. How about Richard Simmons? Nobody likes him.

UPDATE. Reader Mary Caliendo points out that McCain has picked up the blame-Clinton ball. The Senator also asks China to "step up to the plate." If he means the plate piled with riches we constantly serve up to the Red East in return for their sweatshop labor, I'd say they were there already. And it will be interesting to see -- if we get to see -- how China might respond to pressure from the U.S. on this: do they fear our wrath as much as we fear the loss of their cheap manufactures, or their grip on one trillion U.S. dollars?

SHORTEST ALICUBLOG POST EVER: WTF?

NYUK, NYUK, NYUK. So how's the Most Powerful Nation on Earth doing against the Axis of Evil -- or, as I like to think of them, Moe, Larry and Curly? Iraq -- originally the Curly of the outfit, though now downgraded to Shemp or perhaps even Joe Besser status -- has been "liberated" and "pacified" -- that is to say, it's a basket case, where daily life has become so dangerous that authorities recently had to stick a flak jacket on Condi Rice before escorting her from Baghdad Airport. Even the Donald Rumsfeld publicity bureau known as OpinionJournal today declared in an offhand tone that "if another 10,000 or 20,000 or however many troops would reassure Iraqis in the months ahead... then by all means President Bush should deploy them."

Iran, the Larry of the outfit, is treading water, with Ahmadinejad working a global charm offensive while riding herd on his opposition back home.

And North Korea, proving a worthy bearer of the mantle of Moe, just blowed up a big bomb. Remind him to kill us later!

We all knew this was coming, given the ham-handed U.S. approach to NK nuclear negotiations. Though previous administrations had managed to maneuver North Korea away from H-bombs, Bush treated and spoke of the Korean nuclear situation in oh-well, whattaya-gonna-do terms, as if it were out of his control: "I think what we have to do is plan for the worst and hope for the best."

Now Kim's got a working bomb, and naturally the conservative response is: we have GOT to keep the Democrats out of office, or they might fuck up even worse than we have! "...we know what the Democratic Party and its media surrogates will want to do -- begin a comprehensive and multi-lateral campaign to BLAME BUSH!!!" cries Dean Barnett. References to 9/11, WWII, and Awakening the American People to their Grave Peril naturally follow.

"When the conflagration comes, it will burn as surely as night follows day," intones Josh Trevino from atop a plinth, toga rippling in the wind. "The puerile predator in Pyongyang will do no less. We have failed to prevent: now it falls to us to deter, and in time, avenge." Avenge what? Maybe he means the North Korean "slave state," generally; Trevino once lived near it, of which joyous days he still has happy memories of "leftist students assaulting our housing compound," apparently forging a lifelong bond between Trevino and his noisy neighbors. Or maybe he seeks vengeance for this: if we nuke North Korea, maybe the radiation will seep over into Seoul, and that guy Trevino couldn't get arrested in '05 will finally get his.

Others also appear optimistic -- not for the imminent bloodshed, but because of the possibility of Republican political advantage. "Mr. Kim drives Foley off the front page -- or does he? Well, he better," sez Roger L. Simon. But his heart's not in it -- not like the old days of the Iraqi cakewalk and flag lapel pins! "Foley was starting to get boring," yes, but still there is a "fundamental lack of seriousness of a great part of our society, especially in the political and media classes" -- not like Simon, playing Stratego with Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Ledeen all night long! "In a way I hope the Democrats win in November, so that they are forced to face reality." Wow -- he's so rattled, he's forgotten we're all traitors!

In short, thanks to the persistence of human stupidity, this urgent worldwide crisis promises to be as hilarious as any other.

UPDATE. At Ace of Spades HQ, poster "Dave from Garfield Ridge" (who reveals, to our horror, in comments that "my day job touches on a lot of what I write about...national security stuff...") repeats the new wisdom: "The big lesson today is the most obvious one, a lesson most any reader here could have imparted long before we got here. Namely, that any nation that wants nuclear weapons will eventually get them, and will get them by any means necessary." Gee, if they've felt that way since "long before we got here," when Bush gave his original Axis of Evil speech, why didn't he just say, "We give up"?

Actual sensible commentary here.

SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE. Good news! The voters don't blame Republicans for Foley -- they blame fags!

UPDATE. Crunchy Rod Dreher steps up to give Althouse a run for her funny. Dreher quotes a guy who thinks the Foley case shows that the GOP "elites" -- i.e., the kind who use a knife and fork when they eat -- are out of sync with regular Republicans. Dreher agrees, with a twist:

I socialize with many conservatives who are one way or another elites, and even if they (like me) oppose the demands of the gay rights movement (e.g., gay marriage) for reasons of political or moral principle, we honestly aren't made uncomfortable by being around gay people. It's not even an issue, so gay protests that conservatives are burning with fear and loathing of gays strikes me as way overblown, and an attempt to avoid actually considering our arguments on their own merits.

But to be fair, this comment makes me think about how unrepresentative my relationship with gay folks is of the typical conservative's.

Sounds like he feels bad that he isn't made uncomfortable by the mere presence of homosexuals -- because even that limited level of tolerance separates him from the Salt of the Earth and the Common Clay. Maybe it's time he went back to Bible Camp to learn how to be more judgmental.

UPDATE II. My favorite Dreher commenter:

But personally (and this has nothing to do with the legal argument against gay marriage) I find homosexuality even more revolting than a man (or woman) having sex with an animal. Hey, does this make me a bigot?

A: Yes.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION. Regular readers may have noticed that I don't discuss my sex life much. Though it would make, as I think most people's would, a rich tale, full of drama and comedy and pathos, I yet cling to the old-fashioned notion that a gentleman never tells.

Not everyone feels that way, though:

I like various positions! With the lights on and off! In the daytime and the nighttime! In the ocean and in the windowseat! I like sex on Sunday mornings! Can I get an “AMEN” for Cunnilingus? AMEN for cunnilingus! Can I get a “You know how to whistle, don’t you” for Fellatio? “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” Can I get a “Ride’em Cowboy” for my husband? Yippeekayae! Can I get an “arghghghghg” for Readi Whip and maraschino cherries? Arghghghghghg! What, no brownies?

This noisome display is not from The Vagina Monologues, but from The Anchoress -- normally a reliable right-wing scold who speaks of sex primarily as an agent of death, who has been driven to this uncharacteristically lurid extremity by the Foley scandal.

Her idea -- and that of the comrades to whom she links in her post -- is, near as I can figure, that by finding humor in the current Congressional tsimmis, liberals have abandoned the high ground -- or the deep rut, depending on how you look at it -- of sexual liberty, which she now claims for herself.

As a sometime author of erotic fiction, I find The Anchoress' effort lacking in both style and prurience. Still, to each her own; at some early stage of sexual awakening, plain declarations of enthusiasm may provide sufficient titillation.

As for the political effect -- which I suspect is the real animator of this exhibition -- she needn't have bothered. As I have tirelessly observed, the Democrats have been cast, and well cast, as America's horndogs, and it will take more than a few Instant Messages to dislodge us. Besides, the election is only a month away, and near the event we may expect Republican operatives to haul out the FAGS A-GITTIN' HITCHED! banner to rally voters to their cause. Whatever amateurs may think, the pros know that there is more to be gained by promoting hatred of other people's sex lives than from celebration of one's own.

Speaking of amateurs, this phenomenon is mainly interesting as an expression of discontent among right-wing bloggers.

Sex-hatred has been a key factor in the Republican strategy for quite some time -- whether couched in terms of gay marriage, rainbow parties, wardrobe malfunctions, the Clenis, or any other available mechanism for welding Democrats to a realm of human life that apparently still baffles and disgusts a large number of voters.

The top conservative bloggers, despite their self-portrayal as men and women of The Peepul, tend to be professional word-workers with some education and prestige (law professors, speechwriters, journalists, students, etc). They have to know this Republican freakishness about sex is all bullshit. But they have gone along because it has been good for their Party and the non-sex-based causes it supports -- endless war on Muslims, low taxes on rich people, and such like.

By a willful misreading of the current scandal-twisted situation, some of them see an opportunity to speak up for sex without abandoning their Republican affiliation. This opportunity is so rare, and so delayed, that when they finally feel themselves free to speak out for sucking and fucking, it comes out explosively, in a pressurized stream of clumsily suggestive gibberish.

For all the harm their reign has done our country, let us be grateful at least that we are not so afflicted.

TIGERS 6, YANKEES 0. Mr. Rogers, where was this shit when you pitched for us? I ain't seen curves like that since they closed Billy's Topless.

I liked the Tommy Lasorda commercials, too. Lasorda's blog is just okay, though I love when he says stuff like "Go out and vote for Nomar, it is your duty!" I wonder what it would be like if comments were unmoderated. (What a pity Earl Weaver isn't around to do podcasts.)

UPDATE. Actually Tommy can curse pretty good too when a pitcher's giving him a hard time during a fucking World Series game. (The organ music is a wonderful accompaniment.) But Weaver had more style.

LITERALLY. David Brooks says, oh yeah, you liberals think the Foley scandal is bad, well, there's an underage seduction in The Vagina Monologues but you liberals love that, don't you?

Stunned onlookers point out to Brooks that The Vagina Monologues is a play, whereas Mark Foley is a real person. Ann Althouse -- she takes pictures, you know! -- responds:

The third letter notes Brooks's omission of the "simple point" that what Mark Foley did was "real" and "The Vagina Monologues" is "make-believe." But, again, the enthusiasm for "The Vagina Monologues" is very real.

There are a lot of things you could say to this. You could try to explain to these people the concept of fictional characters. You could try to explain that not every character in every scene speaks for the author. You could try to explain that these cows are very small, while those cows are far away.

It would all be a waste of time. Some kinds of ignorance are so obviously the result of hard, patient work that all you can really do about them is marvel at God's creation and move on.

UPDATE. I just had to haul this comment on up to the front of the class: "Millions of people enjoyed Silence of the Lambs, and yet if a Republican were caught engaging in murder and cannibalism, you can only imagine how the hypocritical liberals would react."

UPDATE II. Comments at Professor Althouse's place also augment the hilarity, but in a different way:

Didn't the left give us performance art and haven't leftists, in their never ending pursuit of absolute equality, instructed us the everything is art and that we're all artists?

When'd we do that? I've got to start coming to more of the meetings.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY. Now that I no longer work for any of the people Bob Woodward is exposing, it's amazing how much better his writing has become.

YEAH, WE GOOD. I have a cold and lots to do but I can't keep myself from watching these Mets. They're pumped bigger than usual, but not out of proportion -- their playoff jam is a natural extension of their regular-season jam: more clapping and arm-flinging between plays, but outside of that the same easy, team-wide shit-eating grin at being part of a very good machine.

I only got one game in at Shea this year, but even over the TV their pleasure this season has been radiant. It's very different from 2000, when the madman Bobby Valentine pushed by force of cap-chewing will a bunch of pretenders into the World Series, only to watch them crumble against the hated Yankees. I'll always respect Bobby V for that -- it was a brilliant specimen of the ridiculous persistence that keeps Mets fans sane in the long off-years. We've had shitty teams and shitty seasons, but sometimes, just as we're saying to hell with it, we come back from the concession stand to find we ain't done so bad after all. 2000 was the apotheosis of Orange and Blue* hope against hope.

But in the past few years the Mets have gone another way. They've reinvigorated the farm teams and shown something resembling patience. Look how Willie Randolph and Omar Minaya have nurtured the present crew. Who knew it was a good idea to lose Mike Cameron and gain Carlos Delgado? Dumbass me, I thought that was a wash. I thought Tom Glavine was a bad bet from day one, and expected we'd trade him away in the new era -- but look at his line tonight! And whatever the Skipper has been saying to Reyes and Wright ought to be recorded and kept in a vault for future generations to Talmudically ponder. And Julio Franco! 48 goddamn years old! Makes it to first and bats in a run! I haven't trusted an old man on the Mets since Derek Bell pulled up lame in 2000 -- and he was only 33.

They were overexcited in the 9th -- Reyes' throw pulled Delgado off the bag for the first out, and for the last. But they got the job done.

We're up 2-0 and our small-ball team is looking at the harder-they-fall Cards in the NLCS. It ain't '86, but it's pretty sweet.

Why to love the Mets, here. Why to hate the Yankees (like you need a reason), here.

* Yeah, I'm Old School.

SHORTER MICHELLE MALKIN: If I can't post on websites that don't want me, the Islamofascists will have won.

(Why doesn't she just take her top off? I'll post her stupid video if she does.)

THE HE-MAN JESUS-HATERS CLUB. Remember the right-wing gibberish about the Amish schoolhouse murders? (Psst, just say yes! It's two posts down!) We can officially top it, now that John Derbyshire has weighed in on the treasonous, Jesus-emulating Pennyslvania Dutch grandpa who counseled some of that other-cheek* crap. In response to John Podhoretz' objection ("this story disturbs me deeply... I'm not sure I would want to be someone who succeeded in rising above hatred..." He needn't worry), Derbyshire writes:

A civilization that can't summon up some pretty widespread hatred for a man who lines up little girls and shoots them in their heads, after having been foiled in an attempt to molest them, is a civilization with a spring broken somewhere.

Here, the famously unstable Derbyshire seems to conflate "civilization" (in Derbspeak, the United States of America and all affilated homosexuals) with the Amish grandpa -- a brain-chemical rather than a philosophical issue, as even Derb must, when sedated, understand that ours is a society pulsating with inchoate hatred, and that much of it is discharged upon the perpetrator(s) of the criminal-outrage-of-the-week, albeit in absentia via dinner-table conversation or barroom braggadocio. (Those of us who have regular contact with Americans will recall how often we were told what Joe Citizen would do if he got his hands on Bin Laden, in those days before George W. Bush declared Bin Laden irrelevant.)

Leftover inchoate hatred then devolves upon wives, girlfriends, rival football teams, and perpetrator(s) of the celebrity-outrage-of-the-week.

You know you've reached some sort of a milestone when you make Rod Dreher look sane.

As I've said before, I'm not a Christian except in habits and morality. Derbyshire says he is one, and yet visits upon a perfect Imitator of Christ the sort of treatment he usually reserves for gay people. I would say it represents a new low, but I have been writing this for a few minutes, and I'm sure something worse has been published meanwhile.

* Duncan, don't even start. I checked the Sermon on the Mount, and the other-cheek stuff was not a typo.

UPDATE. A little clarifying on linkages added.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR. The Foley scandal continues its widening gyre. Foley himself is becalmed in rehab, but no one cares about him. The Parties are surfing the gyre. The Republicans have the worse job, and are trying all kinds of wild shit to reverse its course. The Perfesser hehindeeds through the howling wind that it's really about gay hypocrisy, or pro-gay hypocrisy that's really anti-gay, or some damn thing. His comrade cries out:

Does anyone seriously think that the Democrats can position themselves as the party of sexual restraint? The party that will be tough on gay men, straight men, or anyone else who gives off even a whiff of impropriety?

Please - this is not a bidding war the Democrats can win and I am reasonably certain that, after years of "sex is a private matter", it is not a war the Democrats want to start.

But like most shouting into the wind, this is bootless. As previously noted here, the Democrats are considered the Party of libertine sex, as a thousand Leno jokes will attest. The Republicans have encouraged that perception, and positioned themselves as the Party of family values, and benefited from the comparison. When one of their own got caught out, no one thought the roles had been magically reversed. We just thought the Republicans had fucked up. Again.

Remember when the cry over Clinton was, it's not the sex, it's the lying/perjury/hypocrisy? Now it's not the sex, it's the fuckups. We expect our politicians to lie and perjure themselves and be hypocrites, but when Denny Hastert goes blundering around trying to explain Foley on the radio, it may be that the average observer is not reminded of Clinton or Gary Condit or Jim McGreevey, but of Rumsfeld, and "Brownie," and Abramoff: the spectacle of a Party that runs nearly all our government, once again giving mumbled, grudging responses when things go wrong on their watch.

When the Foley scandal subsides, no lingering taint of sex madness will adhere to the Republicans. The stink of failure may grow a smidge more ripe, though.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A LIBERAL CONSPIRACY. Hugh Hewitt directs our attention to this analyst of the recent Amish schoolhouse shooting, who closes:

How a culture finds a balance between love and weakness, fear, aggression and violence, is a puzzle that is not easily solved. I wonder if a more mobilized society, one which deems it appropriate and acceptable for all members of the society to have the right and the knowledge to defend themselves, will not eventually be the avenue of wisdom.

So, there's your answer: if the Amish schoolgirls were packing heat, none of this would have happened.

Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, asked about the incident, says, "I mean, we focus so much on the mental health of girls and women, and we’ve neglected a lot of the boys and men in this country. You go into a school, and a lot of times, the boys’ psychological and mental health is sort of neglected." Damn bitches, hoggin' up the mental health care. Every time I go to my court-mandated therapist appointments, they're all looking at me like, what's this guy doing here?

Columbine Dad tells Katie Couric that it's all about abortion. (Hat tip to God Is For Suckers.)

This guy's just nuts.

If you're wondering why these guys think the Foley scandal is a Democratic plot, this will give you a hint. For them, everything bad that happens in life has something to do with a little bag of fetishes labelled "liberalism." That's why they can go on mouthing rank absurdities while the rest of us are giving them that Springtime for Hitler stare.

UPDATE. Red State commenter: "President Bush has called a meeting next Tuesday of 'experts' to figure out what can be done. I hope this is not just a political move to appear to be in favor of protecting kids, but is actually designed to get real results." I wonder if he was trying to be funny.

WHY IS JANE GALT? A few posts back I challenged Jane Galt's notion that if we don't like our present economy, it means we also don't like iPods and 2-way wrist TVs and all the other great innovations of our times. Now she says this means my readers and I are Marxists with "a deep emotional need for things to be getting worse in order to justify their political beliefs."

Obviously arguing with her is a waste of time, but I will leave one question: if I think the Marx Brothers are funnier than Adam Sandler, does that mean I prefer the Great Depresssion to the Clinton Boom?

ANIMALS CAN BE BRED AND SLAUGHTERED… Reihan Salam reviews Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. The premise of the film, he says (I haven't yet had the pleasure), is that “yuppies” won’t breed, so slack-jawed yokels who like fart jokes will inherit the earth and manage it very badly. Sounds pretty funny. Here’s Salam’s reaction:

…[Judge is] telling thoughtful Americans that we can't expect other people to solve our problems for us. If you're alarmed by the callousness and the crassness of our culture, which you certainly should be, do something about it. Lead or follow. Getting out of the way is not an option. Failing that, you should at least try to outbreed the people you hate most.

We’ve seen this idea before in conservative circles: that The Right People are underbreeding and thus allowing the Wrong People to dominate. Of course, usually the Right People are portrayed as the White People. I don’t think Salam’s saying that, but what is he saying? That smart people should “outbreed” stupid people? That “yuppies” should outbreed the underprivileged?

It is rare and sort of charming when they show faith in any branch of science at all, but even I know that genetics is more complicated than that.