ARTS REVIEW. It's been a slow month for me art-wise. After 200 pages I gave up on One Hundred Years of Solitude -- it's beautiful writing, of course, but I kept thinking, wait, haven't I read this part already? The Russians can be hard to keep track of, too, but they have more conversations to jolt one back to attentiveness. Maybe I'm a horrible philistine, but I could have done with less magic and more realism. With that admitted, on to some impressions:

Borat. I guess what's got many people excited about this movie is the permission it gives us to enjoy ethnic humor in a public place without any consequences. Sasha Cohen's smart move was to pick a barely-known former Soviet satellite as his dummy's country of origin -- though to be fair, Al Capp did it first with Lower Slobbovia -- so only a tiny part of his audience would be directly offended, and the rest of us could cover ourselves with the excuse that we aren't laughing at Borat's ethnicity, but at his cultural isolation. It's really more like hillbilly humor than Polish jokes, all the way down to the incest and arranged marriage bits. Jeff Foxworthy gets away with this sort of thing all the time. But Borat isn't regionally distinct in the same way, so for American viewers there's nothing culturally at stake. Even Borat's anti-Semitic ravings provoke no internal second-guessing because Borat represents no recognizable constituency. Even when morons agree with him, there's no chance that an audience will. He's a perfect buffoon, and audiences sense it immediately: no shibboleths were harmed in the production of this movie.

This is liberating, on the simplest level. Cohen takes the freedom Borat grants him and runs amok with it, crashing through guerilla to gross-out humor. The result is way too loose to be called satire -- compared to Borat, "The Beverly Hillbillies" is Aristophanes. The ending is sweet -- I especially liked Borat's decision to free his chicken: "Run, run to your life!" -- but really, it's barely necessary, just a pleasing way of tying up loose ends. Wider claims for the movie are absurd and unnecessary.

The Information. I enjoyed London Fields and its hothouse-dense literary riffs, and I figured, if the hi-lo theme of toffs vs. chavs didn't play out as cataclysmically well for me as I'd hoped, it might have something to do with my relative unfamiliarity with the vagaries of London, to which Amis devoted so much space that I had to assume it was part of a deeper meaning I was missing. Well, this book takes place mostly in London, and there is an underworld part and a middle-class part, and there are lush thickets of description, but I felt more sure-footed in this one and thus less forgiving.

Amis is unparalleled at capturing the top, middle, and bottom notes in the stink of despair -- "he was more pleased than vexed if a bee buzzed him, flattered that anything, however briefly and stupidly, could still mistake him for a flower" -- and his central conceit, of a failed writer consumed with jealous and moral outrage that his unworthy buddy has become a credentialed literary success, is catnip to such as me and mostly well-played. Also, unlike his smugly fraudulent Gwyn Barry, Amis can write for toffee and often for non-pareils, too. But this time he couldn't snow me with the regional guff -- no punk chick, however rarified, behaves like Belladonna, and I'm pretty sure no one like the emblematic thug Steve Cousins, a virgin murderer steeped in pornography, could find a deep connection with the literally unreadable (and sadly unrendered) fiction of Amis' hero -- sorry, that's a metaphor way too far, however Anglicized.

Two books is too few on which to base summary judgment, but what else of his am I going to read? Time's Arrow? The one that goes backwards? Briton, please. As much pleasure as his prose gives me, I smell a rat. As in London Fields, there's a lot of guff here about decay and malaise and the bad end of the old Empire. I'm naturally sympathetic to the theme, but here Amis is observably working too hard at it; the simple comic reversal of the arranged beating in the movie theatre toilet, for example, gets so cluttered with existential dread that the joke gets spoilt. Maybe it is an English thing after all: I understand Amis is all about jihad and the death of the West these days. Yeesh. I prescribe Sullivan's Travels.

Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing and Lying, Cheating, and Stealing. Two 90s anthologies I found in the trash. Good fun, though their titles oversell them; why no frank erotica, or real crime narratives? Probably the editors considered such fare too raw for the joy-popping "transgression"-seeking audiences they targeted, but why? Had they never been to an airport bookstore? Still, anthologies are a great way to shop writers you'd never given a chance before. I feel more justified in ignoring Anais Nin now -- but, Good God, how'd I miss The Ginger Man and Tobias Wolff? My favorite find is Corey Ford, a glib mid-century magazine writer whose 1950 "Office Party" bit is very dated but charming. Manners come and go, but style -- if the author has put in the work to obtain one -- persists.

And, oh yeah, the Cezanne to Picasso and Americans in Paris shows at the Met? Massive big ups. If you've ever doubted Gaughin, go stand in front of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? for fifteen minutes. It'll put color in your cheeks. While you're there, go look at Winslow Homer's Prisoners from the Front and tell me if you think it's as hilariously homoerotic as I did. Like I said, I suspect I may be a philistine.

UPDATE. As always, this sort of post is redeemed by the genuine cultural information in the comments.

SIGNS OF ADVANCEMENT. Ace of Spades writes,

I've noticed this myself lately. While Allah's heart-throb Kirsten Powers is contantly praising the newly-elected Democrats for their "moderate" positions -- anti-gay-marriage, pro-gun, pro-life -- I can't help but wonder I've stumbled into the Twillight Zone.

I thought such positions were marks of "extremism," not "moderation." Right?

Or does the Democratic Party label suddenly convert what is "extreme" to "moderate"?

More likely, what she means is that these people are rhetorically for these positions, but will nonetheless vote lockstep against any tangible legislation to advance them. "Moderation," in other words, is evidenced what you say you believe, not by what you actually do.

I have to applaud Mr. Spades; he's figured it out! These congresspeople will indeed do nothing to hinder our homosexualist, baby-killing agenda. And for this dereliction of principle, we will give them really good snacks and imported beer.

Let's see now if Mr. Spades can keep from spending the next two years running through the streets like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, warning the populace that Democrats are in favor of abortion and gay rights. Baby steps!

SLOW LEARNERS. No slur on a guy who had the guts to tell the truth about Iraq when every wingnut in Christendom was screaming, "oh, you treasonous Marine!" but the Dems probably did well to elect Hoyer over Murtha. No sense in leaving out too many lightning rods at this delicate stage in the power transfer.

Meanwhile I see the Republicans, having chosen Trent Lott as their champion, continue to argue, through their most popular Internet operative, for more of the same in Iraq. Their new CW seems to be: admit some people, not to be confused with oneself, were a little off about the cakewalk, but Austin Bay had a fleeting moment of clarity two years ago, so we should definitely follow his present counsel, i.e., full endorsement of Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters KILL! KILL! KILL! policy.

I feel just the slightest bit optimistic. Maybe I should have a drink or something.

UPDATE. Of course, Republicans can always avail this trick by The Anchoress: the Back-Up Prediction! It's like a two-bagger: a spare in case the first one breaks!

UPDATE II. "I don't see how this can be anything other than a defeat for Nancy Pelosi," says the Ole Perfesser. That would make me reconsider my own position, if I didn't know better than to trust anything the guy says. Surely anyone who has achieved tenure, even at a sleepy Bible college, knows that there are wheels within wheels in any game of power. I chalk his blather up to widespread conservative hunger for victories of even the imaginary sort.

UPDATE III. Can you believe we're actually discussing Democratic political strategy? As if it were something important, like Hawthorne or autumn breezes? I feel so dirty, and not in the good way.

YOU WERE THE BEST QUALIFIED... BUT THEY HAD TO GIVE YOUR AMERICAN BEAUTY REVIEW TO A MINORITY BECAUSE OF A RACIAL QUOTA! Fans of the Wingnut Diversity Paradox -- in which a.) complaints about all those fruity liberals with their quotas and their rainbows, and b.) demands that colleges or newspapers or Hollywood make some right-wing affirmative action hires pronto, exist within the same cramped mental space -- can find a ripe new version at the Crunchy Con blog.

Brother Dreher provides an update that suggests a fleeting moment of self-awareness--

You may be thinking, "So what does he want? He's complaining because the Times is not hiring more conservatives on its op-ed page for the sake of diversity, at the same time he's complaining about newsrooms hiring for diversity? How does that make sense?" Let me try to explain.

--and then he uncorks an illustrative example that, I must admit, widened even my gimlet eye:

In my own case, about a decade ago I applied for a film critic's position at a particular newspaper, was told by the arts editor that he loved my writing, and wanted to hire me. He called back later and sheepishly told me he couldn't bring me in for an interview, because his boss told him they wanted to hire a woman or a minority... The only reason for this was because I am a white male... The idea that no matter how hard I worked to write well, I couldn't overcome this bias against me because of the color of my skin and my gender was debilitating...

Cut to Dreher's hands crumpling his rejection letter.

Having suffered through Dreher's reviews in the paper that did hire his white ass -- the New York Post -- I think it altogether likely that the other editor was too polite to tell Dreher that his writing blew, and made up an affirmative-action yarn knowing that the excitable Southron would believe such a thing.

May Dreher never come to the soul-shattering realization that his whole career, cossetted by conservative editors and publishers, is an epic example of affirmative action in the old-fashioned style.

UPDATE. In comments, Dreher denies a critic's charge that "women and minorities are underrepresented in large, daily newsrooms" -- though later he seems to admit he was only talking about the "women" part ("I've never seen a figure about the ethnic minority representation in our newsroom," says Dreher -- I never before realized that he was physically blind). Dreher also denies that he was hired because of his wingnut bonafides, though "If I had been hired as a conservative, that would have been fine with me."

He also says David Brooks is his favorite Times writer because of Brooks' "interesting and unconventional conclusions." Oh, but this is the bestest bit of all:

Kristof is a brave and intrepid reporter, but how many times can you write, "Life is wretched in the Third World"? That sounds harsh, and I apologize for that, but I guess I have to admit I used to consider him a must-read, but now I think, "Here we go, another tale of woe from the Third World."

I might just decide to be a Jesus Freak myself. You don't have to give a shit about anyone but yourself, apparently, and they feed you really well.

THE NEW PROTEIN CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: "Politics is a blood sport and the Republicans have always played like it’s Chutes and Ladders (actually a ruthless game if you get into playing it)..."

(pause to consider this lot playing Chutes and Ladders in a ruthless manner, with lots of screaming, gnashing of teeth, and rending of Cheetos bags)

"The Republicans just can’t find the gumption to be disliked. The Democrats thrive on hate. It is their fuel and their fire. So the Republicans can continue acting as they always have--as the kick-me party, playing second fiddle to ruthless, ethics-challenged, but winning and leadership wielding opponents..."

This is a content-rich delusion, and I leave its derision up to you, but will add that Ken McLeod just wrote to remind me of this:

In Maryland, homeless men recruited from out-of-state shelters were recruited to pass out flyers meant to trick voters in black neighborhoods into thinking the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Robert Ehrlich, and Senate candidate, Michael Steele, were Democrats. This one couldn't be blamed on "contractors;" one busload was welcomed by Governor Ehrlich's wife. In North Carolina college students asked voters if they were registered Democrats, and if they said yes, handed them a list of "our" judicial candidates -— actually a list of Republicans. A California "information guide for Democrats" told voters to vote "no" on propositions backed by Democrats. Poll watchers brandishing handguns intimidated Latino voters in Arizona — a Republican trick there going back to 1962, when the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was allegedly involved....

It isn't a partisan thing, so much, but when you hear Republicans claiming that they didn't get their way this time because they were too nice, it just doesn't seem very -- what's the word? -- reality-based.

MORNING SPIT-TAKE. Michael Rubin:

Terrorists kidnapped scores of Iraqis from a higher education research institute. It says a lot that the Western media, Europe, and the Arab League don't react with the same outrage that they did over the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Here's some outrage for you, pal: we sacrificed all those lives, all that money, and the respect of the world just to make a fucking Evelyn Waugh theme park where terrorists can wander into government buildings and snatch 100 guys in broad daylight? Please extend my outrage to your imbecile friends who made it so.

Now to vomit, rinse my face with cold water, and get back to whipping up my famous, frothy, literary glacées, each containing no more than a soupçon of outrage.

A NEW LOW, VERSION 3,522. A few years back, I suggested that a particularly moronic Armed Liberal post was emblematic of the whole warblogger way of life. The following Corner post has a similarly valedictory feeling about it. I can imagine visiting the attic, decades hence, opening a trunk and finding these words embedded in block of Digiluce and thinking, boy, does that take me back:

Re: The Simpsons [Iain Murray]

Yesterday's episode wasn't just unfunny, it was very poorly animated - a 1970s Hanna-Barbera-level of crudeness. The sequence in which Lenny's car was crushed looked like it had been drawn by a 10 year-old trying to draw The Simpsons. I can only assume they're devoting all their time and effort to the movie.

As for BSG, I agree with Jonah's long-trusted reader and had exactly the same argument, err, discussion with my wife during the episode. Far more fun was Doctor Who in the hour beforehand, which involved Rose berating a pompous psuedo-patriot for not knowing how to fly the Union Flag and also included an interesting nod to the realization that families need fathers at the end...

The disturbing thing is, I don't yet know whether I will be recalling the nadir of a certain kind of idiocy, or the beginning of a whole new wave of idiocy. Well, guess I'll have to go on living to find out!

UPDATE: Michelle, She-Wolf of the PJM, joins in the denunciation of "military-bashing" cartoons "The Simpsons" and "The Family Guy." "The mockery of Army recruiters and enlistees is absolutely disgusting," she says. Please, dear God, don't tell her about Sad Sack!

GO BACK TO BEING JUST NORMALLY WRONG, PLEASE. After the death of everything they believed in (i.e., the right to claim most Americans believed the same crazy shit they believed), the Protein Wisdom crew has turned to creative writing. Here a member of the committee attempts a prose-poem on New York City. The author thinks New York City smells bad and the girls are ugly, and he saw a roller-blader whom he found effeminate.

Were I he, I would look into sawing wood.

SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT MASQUERADING AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY: A SPECIALITY! Allow me to quote me! Just the other moment, the big "I" (of medium build, pale complexion, and limited omniscience) was watching the internet, when Norbizness commenced to bitch about car commercial jingles. Sez I to Norb, I says

The use of these incredibly inapposite songs to sell ugly, stupid cars make[s] a pretty good argument that we have moved beyond postmodernism into a new phase which I would like to call "Apocalyptic Science Fiction Viewed from the Inside."

I kill me. But I also have a point. As a society, our tolerance for bullshit long ago became an appetite. I will not revive here the usual speech about meta and self-referential whatnot, but I will say this: if there's any justice, David Letterman will one day be recognized as the father of our era.

Like other great men, Letterman knew that Americans were dumb as rocks but still had their pride, so if you were going to feed them the intellectual equivalent of hogslop, you had better flatter their intelligence at the same time.

While genii such as Cecil B. DeMille managed this trick by festooning their slopfests with Biblical and historical trappings -- making anti-culture look like culture -- Letterman found a much cheaper, much more insidious angle: let the rubes in on the gag. Call the pet tricks "stupid," make the showbiz flash-and-rattle even stupider than it needed to be, and cheerfully represent yourself as the hollowest of hollow men, and the suckers would applaud not only your twaddle, but the label on the twaddle that said it was twaddle.

Thus we began to accept lack of sincerity as an American equity, if not a virtue. This threw commercial culture into reverse gear: stupid and ugly were no longer absolute negative virtues. Evil wasn't even a negative virtue -- look at the revived popularity of Donald Trump, once admired for his imbecile dynamism, now frankly lionized for his cruel willingness to fire people on national television. Nowadays the only negative virtues have to do with being a Loser: indicted, dumped, disgraced. But with enough money and a sufficiently energetic image handler, I'm sure even Kevin Federline can come back from exile.

As a liberal baby-killing sodomite, I can accept moral relativism in most things, but it breaks my American heart to see public relations, advertising, and celebrity management unmoored from the verities.

Now look where we are. As the cars get increasingly, seemingly willfully, ugly and stupid, Madison Avenue abandons all pretense of claiming benefits, aspirational or otherwise, and simply turns up the freshness on the visual and musical accompaniment. This is not the proverbial pig lipstick -- no one thinks this will fool anyone into thinking an Escalade is in any way analogous to Led Zep. This is an abandonment of all responsibility. This is, "Oh, fuck, I don't know, you want to buy this car? Whatever. Here's some music so you don't get too bored while we do our shitty sales pitch."

Seen from the perspective of old-and-wrongthink, using bitchin-rad tunes to advertise these depressingly awkward assemblages of metal and polymer is like using the O'Jays at their most rambunctious to introduce an emphysemic 70-year-old to the fashion models he wishes to date. It is rankly, hilariously absurd. But nowadays, why the hell not? It might work. Look at the love life of Harrison Ford. That's victory enough for unreason to keep the various agencies, consultancies, working groups, and subcommittees that signed on to this nightmare scenario from having to run off into the swamps, there to subsist on toads and newts and every low, crawling thing until their ignominy is forgotten.

What does this have to do with politics, you might be wondering (especially if you are my shill at the back of the hall who has been paid to shout the question).

Well, here's a bit of the Times' article on Jon Tester today:

Chouteau County, where Mr. Tester lives on a homestead of 1,800 acres, lost 8.5 percent of its population in the last five years — typical of much of rural America that has been in decline since the Dust Bowl...

“When Jon talks about the cafe that’s trying to hold on, the hardware store that just closed, the third generation that can’t make a living on the farm, he is living that life,” Mr. Doherty said...

On the campaign trail, Mr. Tester spoke often of how “regular folks” just “haven’t been given much of a shake"...

There's even a bit about Tester spitting sunflower seeds, though several expected quotes such as "the big corporations are going to hear from little folks like you and me" and "I sure could go for some of my Maw-Maw's antelope stew right now" seem to have been edited for length.

Now, this is bullshit -- a campaign circular disguised as a newspaper profile -- but it is reality-based bullshit of the old-fashioned variety. I make no moral claims for it, but its simple propagandistic construction gives me more pleasure than the post-post-modern variety, in which, for example, it is asserted that the occupation of Iraq is going well, despite all evidence to the contrary, because a single blogger ("'Sooni,' who describes himself as a 'free man"' living in Baghdad") said so. Give me old-fashioned ballyhoo and tubthumping over the wholesale denunciation of reality anytime.

I am prejudiced myself in favor of the Democrats for all sorts of reasons, but not least among them is my deep antipathy toward the very modern kind of casual unreason that has been the stock in trade of the Republicans' preeminent online defenders -- as an hour's perusal of this site (a excellent way to spend your lunch or coffee break) will show.

Now that the Dems have gained some advantage, I expect I will take more notice of their nonsense, and get annoyed. But until that nonsense starts to come even close to the sort of high-flown gibberish that right-wing bloggers have perfected during their long ascendancy, I probably won't shift gears very often.

OK, ONE MORE POST-ELECTION POST! Because it cannot be left unmentioned that, after this maudlin performance, it will be impossible (well, more impossible than ever, I should say -- it has always been impossible, yet people go right on doing it) to insist that the Ole Perfesser is "certainly not a Republican." You just don't give pep talks like this to someone else's team. Maybe those of his acolytes who are heavily invested in a pretense of Perfessorial non-partisanship can avail a plausible-deniability scenario: the Perfesser didn't back into the Party, the Party backed into him!

Christ, what a fraud that guy is.

We can be more forgiving toward Ann Althouse, who is clearly non compos mentis. After explaining how the election of Democrats will lead to eternal harrassment by terrorists --

Wait, let me actually quote the passage I just summarized -- some of you are new here, and may think I'm exaggerating:

It's the failure of Americans to support the war. It's the folding and crumpling because things didn't go well enough and the way we conspicuously displayed that to our enemies. They're going to use that information.

For how long?

Forever...

How much harder it becomes ever to fight and win a war again. Only pacifists and isolationists should feel good about the way this election was won.

Cut to Bugs Bunny holding up a card bearing images of a screw and an 8-ball.

At the same time, Althouse reveals that she remained scrupulously non-partisan (you know how she hates partisans!) throughout the campaign. She even "voted for half Democrats and half Republicans" -- possibly using the eenie, meeny, minee, moe method. Taking her word for it (we did use the Simple Test on her, but her ravings broke our machine just like Kirk and Mudd's double-talk broke that robot in "I, Mudd"), we understand, with a little gasp of horror, what maddens her: by her scrupulous adherence to a pretense of non-partisanship, she has put herself in a position to be partially blamed for the treasonous outcome of the election! You cannot be telling the truth because everything you say is a lie... you lie, you tell the truth, you -– Illogical! Illogical! Please explain!

Well, at least she doesn't have a job that she can't do crazy.

HIATUS. Well, not entirely. But I'm making a sincere effort not to talk anymore about the right-wing bloggers' election post-mortems. As they keep on writing such summaries, and as they are often freaking hilarious and tempting objects of mockery, that will be a tough pledge to honor, so I may have to stay off the keyboard a few days just to keep from backsliding.

One word about Rummy, though. There's only one reason I can see why Bush waited till after the election to dump him: if he had done it during the campaign, it would have made him look conciliatory, which in the Republican thesaurus is a synonym for "weak." Once the jig was up and there were no votes to hold fast with a show of unrelenting manliness, no one gave a damn. Rumsfeld gets a nice long break before Jeb Bush's invasion of Mesapotamia, Bush gives another aging GOP time-server a plum gig -- everybody wins, except all the poor sons of bitches who'll get blown to bits before the final act in this Kabuki epic plays out.

UPDATE. It is suggested in comments that Rummy just doesn't want to go to prison. I expect that, when the day of reckoning comes (probably never, but indulge me), it will not matter who is holding the football at the time, and we will extradite the former SecDef from whichever of his many homes he then inhabits -- even if it's the one in Santa Domingo, which I'm sure is heavily fortified with gatling guns and cocaine-fueled suicide squads.

I should mention that I am also taking this time to retool alicublog for the Democratic era. Previously I let a lot of things slide because there was no point in paying attention. When John Bolton was muscled into the Ambassador's post, for example, I felt no need to question the decision: under the rule of Republicans run amok, that made as little sense as protesting the decision of Dracula to suck the blood of virgins, on grounds that their blood should instead be extracted by mad scientists who would then breed them with monkeys to produce a race of supermammals (the moderate approach).

Now I have to proceed as if the worst possible outcome is not a foregone conclusion.

POSITIVELY THE LAST POST-ELECTION POST. I should have stopped long since, but couldn't help myself. I'm not gloating, mind -- all the Democrats won is a chance: they have the potential to score big or whiff disastrously. On that score, knowing the Party's checkered history, I am more anxious than smug.

(Though I will enjoy the early days of ritual humiliation, when Speaker Pelosi begins each session by spitting and trampling on a flag, and we ram through a bill to make all the preachers get gay-married and declare December 25th National Sodomy Day.)

But the right-wings blogs have been hard to ignore. A lot of them have been hilariously maudlin -- take this genius, who imagines that both the American People and the Democrats will be sorry they fucked with George W. Bush. "It is not like the president NEEDS the job OR the headaches," he grouses. "He has nothing to gain personally and has gotten nothing but criticism for trying to keep our country safer." A man with his talents, he could have been anything he wanted to -- business developerer, philophosist, choreologist -- but somehow he wound up running this crummy country, and we don't even appreciate it! Why, next election, George W. Bush might not run at all.

Even more instructive, in a way, have been the bloggers who suggest that, when the Republicans remove from themselves all taint of scandal, they will once again be worthy champions of the American electorate. To hear them tell it, this will be accomplished in something like a trip to the shop, where the weirdos and perverts will be scraped from the undercarriage and anti-sleaze poured into the radiator and the Party rolled out shiny and good's new.

They seem not to know -- or maybe they're just pretending not to know -- that our Parties are throughly scandalized, not by steamroom or macaca, but by money, and by the pressing need for unimaginable buttloads of it to get anywhere near public office in this country today. They start by raising buttloads of private wealth to get into office, and wind up managing buttloads of public funds as the people's servants. Then their contributors come around and suggest that some of that public money might best be invested in their own goods and services...

Both parties are susceptible to this kind of thing. However, there is a small but significant difference between them. Unions are heavily invested in Democrats -- therefore, Democrats wind up greasing unions, which plows some of their graft back into the public sphere, at least. The Republicans are mostly beholden to banks, telcoms, and various corporate scumbag outfits, who take their money from Republican legislation and fuck off with it -- and manage to get the Republicans to reduce their own tax burdens, too, which means We the People get double-fucked.

So while both Parties have to cheat and dissemble, the Democrats need merely to be corrupt, while the Republicans have to be downright evil. What was visibly hanging off the Republican Party during the late campaign was often called corruption, but it was nothing so simple or relatively benign as that.

The page-sniffing Foley, the mistress-strangling Sherwood -- and all those Republicans regularly chronicled in Roger Ailes' Grand Old Police Blotter posts -- were not like Clinton getting a blowjob. You expected Clinton to get a blowjob. What you didn't expect was Republicans engaged in dime-novel kink. Clinton was being Clinton; who the hell were these guys being?

And, once that question was out, you could ask it about Republicans who were not actual miscreants, but just plain weird: who was George Allen? What did he stand for besides a belligerent attitude and a thoroughly unearned sense of entitlement? Who was Rick Santorum, saying that the pursuit of happiness "harms America" -- what made him think he could get away with saying something so crazy?

Getting away with it, in general, was their problem. The Republicans had been getting away with crazy, off-the-wall shit for a long time, too long to fake it even when the voters started to get wise. They were as helpless in their passion as Peter Lorre in M. Corruption has its own problems, but these guys had gone beyond corruption, and into the realm of depravity.

Now they can screen their candidates from here to doomsday, but there are only two things that can help them. One is for the Democrats to screw up really bad -- never a slim chance. The other is time -- time enough for America to forget what freaks they are. Fortunately for them, our attention spans shrink by the minute. But I would say that, barring a Dem debacle, 2008 will probably be too soon.

THE WINNER. Only one could wear the sash marked "Stupidest Post-Election Post," and though competition was stiff, Jeff Jarvis ekes out a win. Also-rans The Anchoress and Gates of Vienna are simply monomaniacally deluded; Jarvis has not one but two lost causes for which to find silver linings -- Republicanism, and that Groovy Blog Revolution that Jarvis keeps telling us is just around the corner -- and his game attempt to do them both at once results in a passage of breathtaking incoherence:

I think the internet brought more change to the biorhythms of American politics in this election than the last, but in more subtle ways that we can only now begin to measure.

Start with this: Wouldn’t it be ironic if the netroots’ excommunication of Joe Lieberman led the Democrats to lose a seat and not quite get control of the Senate? It won’t matter much in reality, of course. Lieberman’s still a Democrat, whether some Democrats want him or not.

I'd say biorhythms are pretty damn subtle to start with, but Jarvis goes from subtlety to vaporosity, constructing like a busy mime an alternative reality in which the failure of the netroots' candidate perversely demonstrates the power of the internet. Then we veer off all known maps, into Firesign Theatre territory:

A movement rose up to purge Lieberman from the party but ended up losing one for the party? Or does this demonstrate to party leaders that they can’t lose control of their parties? Can they still? The people and the power brokers have to figure out who’s on top.

Just ask those thousands of folks who wouldn't say "no" to yesterday, or "yes" instead of knowing it all!

Also, did you know that some of us saw our candidates slandered on YouTube instead of TV? That means "Anyone can be Jon Stewart," says Jarvis. I suppose anyone could sweep his hair up like Jon Stewart, and emulate his arch vocal patterns, and talk into a plastic webcam as if he were the host of a famous show, but when that little Citizen Journalist heads off to get in the limo, boy, is he in for a shock.

Jarvis should stick to recycling press releases for internet media hucksters. Anytime he tries this futuristic crap, he sounds like an old beachcomber trying to flatter the hippies into giving him some weed and pussy.

SO HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE/I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE. New reality: Democrats actually lost by winning, because we only elected Democrats because they were more right-wing than the Republicans. This new breed of Dem will make things pretty hot for Speaker Pelosi, believe you me, just as soon as they finish electing her.

One might ask: if these Demoservatives basically agreed with their opponents, why did they go through with this charade of an election? Why didn't James Webb, for example, just cry out, "I refuse to be the cat's-paw of these treasonous bitches! George Allen, take this election -- with my blessing, and the blessing of our Lord Jesus Christ!" Maybe Nancy Pelosi was holding their wives and/or children hostage in an old windmill, or something.

This is all best explained by Reasonable Conservative Jon Swift: "...as Adam Nagourney pointed out in the New York Times, expectations were so high that anything short of winning all 435 House seats and all 33 Senate seats in contention really has to be seen as a setback for the Democrats."

BLAME AMERICA FIRST. "Dear Wisconsin -- You’re my home state, and I love you like a brother... But you’ve let yourself become total suck, politically." -- Protein Wisdom

"The American people embraced the party of cut and run — oops, sorry 'responsible redeployment' — during a war." -- Jonah Goldberg

"The terrorists turned the Spanish election by the deft placement of a few bombs days before an election. They turned ours by killing 100 soldiers in Iraq in one month. (I know, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s how our enemies will interpret it.) That American voters would send such a message is deeply dismaying." -- Mona Charen

"Liberals blame voters for their decisions. I don't want to do that. But if politicians have to live with the consequences of losing their voters, voters have to live with the consequences of losing their politicians, too." -- Ace of Spades (Winner, Richard Nixon Memorial Passive-Aggressive Trophy)

"...if I were an Iraqi I wouldn’t necessarily be booking a spot in the line to the embassy roof, but I’d be checking price and availability." -- James Lileks

"Our job of saving the world just got a little harder, with the appeasement and anger party in control of the House (and possibly the Senate too). Over at the New York Times “political blog,” they’ve picked a few comments from our open thread #4 to illustrate what they call “Sour Gripes,” and completely misrepresented the overall tone of that thread." -- Little Green Footballs

I should talk. I get cranky when my team loses, too. But I'm a fancy-pants Jew York City lie-beral -- I'm supposed to have contempt for the rubes, yahoos, and slack-jawed yokels that mostly comprise our citizenry. (I exclude you, gentle reader, of course.) Republicans, conversely, have been pandering their asses off to Cletus and Brandine for so long that their spasms of America-bashing have a special piquancy, like an Archbishop jerking off in public.

To be fair, a lot of conservatives looked for silver linings, and took comfort that America still hates homosexuals.

ELECTION DAY MESSAGES FROM AMERICA'S LEADING IDIOTS.

The Ole Perfesser: This country has a serious problem with voting fraud -- except when the Democrats complain about it, heh.

Michelle Malkin: This country has a serious problem with voter fraud -- all caused by Democrats! (Except the robocalling -- that's bi-partisan.)

Ann Althouse: If you win you lose. You hear that, Democrats? I said if you win you lose. Dogstar! Stagecoach!

Kathryn J. Lopez: I'm the leader of the show, keepin' you on the go, but I know I can't live without my radio... (as the door slowly opens, screams and curls up in a corner)

Ace of Spades: Imagine the Democrats' defeat! Taste the tears of Chris Matthews! Ahhhh, that's good, yes that's good you little bitch... (as the door slowly opens, screams and curls up in a corner)

James Lileks: Gee, I love old crap. Old people, on the other hand, can go fuck themselves. Muslims will kill us all in the end, thanks to Democrats. I take comfort in memories of telling off that little socialist bitch... ooh, that little bitch... (as the door slowly opens, screams and curls up in a corner)

Brendan Miniter: To become competitive nationally, Republicans have to spend more money in Albany, New York.

Neo Neo-Con: The Democrats must be defeated, because they won't follow the honorable withdrawal methods of Richard Nixon, which led to this Cambodian anecdote I will now use against the Democrats.

The Anchoress: Jesus Eurabia lampost stagecoach Bobby brickbat wahoo abba dabba dabba doo cabbage.

UPDATE. I am much too ill, unfortunately, to drunkblog this year's festivities. And fever delirium and codeine are much too precious to waste on politics, anyway. I look forward to waking up on a different planet, whatever the agency of removal.

UPDATE II. Just woke up! What'd I miss? The grotesque electronic head of the Perfesser crying, "Where are my robowhores? Bring me my robowhores!" And Ann Althouse:

... I just realized I'm on camera... looking like a blogger blogging about the election, but I'm blogging about Britney Spears, ha ha, no one knows...

The cameraman startled me when I glanced over and saw the camera a foot and a half from my face. He's really good at sneaking into a space and getting a shot. Either that or I'm so absorbed while blogging that I lose touch with the real world.

Well, now that she's on TV, I guess the 21st Century has found its Mrs. Miller.

STOP THE PRESSES! Althouse goes Republican! Who saw that coming?

Her commenters are a joy, especially when they're riled by dismissive Democrats. My favorite, so far:

As I've said countless times before, even if we'd done everything according to Monday-morning quarterbacks like you, we would have made a whole new set of mistakes...

Now, without the benefit of hindsight whats the Democrat plan?

Being right is just being wrong in an alternate universe! And no fair peeking at current reality when composing your bogus "plan," Demonrats!

I suppose I'd look pretty funny, myself, if I'd had such unmerited electoral success for so long that my argumentation skills had become totally vestigial. So, by the commenter's logic, I have no right to laugh at him. Yet I do -- further proof of Democrat perversity!

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING. Although tracking the fever chart of American Conservatism can be tedious work, there are compensations. Such as laffs. For example, Orson Scott Card is pulling his ancient "As a Democrat, I hate Democrats" routine, with the assistance of the Ole Perfesser. We remind readers that Card's distinguishing characteristic As a Democrat is his announced belief that "Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books... to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society."

But wait, it gets better. The Perfesser, perhaps showing a heretofore unnoticed sense of humor, points us to one of the few commentators still taken in by Card's masquerade: gay American Eric Scheie. Scheie is inspired by Card's post, and says

I'll vote for the Republicans despite their alleged closets. I'll take their closets over the Democrats' closets. Closets are based on shame, and while I don't think homosexuality is worth being ashamed of, defeat in a war is very definitely worth being ashamed of.

When Scheie is notified that Card doesn't just want to put him in a closet, but in a prison cell as well, he shrugs, "hearing more about him makes this process more interesting. (Whether I agree with him on other issues is irrelevant.)" There's a patriot, folks -- a man who believes in the cause so deeply that he'll stand shoulder to shoulder with someone who, placed in such proximity to him, would take the opportunity to grab his arm and shout for a policeman.

It may be that Scheie has a sense of humor, too. Just a week ago, he said, "anti-gay bigots deserve same sex marriage in pretty much the same way that the Republican Party deserves to lose the election." Who knew at the time that this meant, "not at all"?

Is it any wonder that I can't stop watching them work, despite my best instincts?

ASSHOLE BUDDIES. As the rats exeunt the flotation-challenged U.S.S. Mission Accomplished, we hear by way of a horrifying Vanity Fair article their excuse that no one could have expected shipwreck with such fine men at the helm. Kenneth Adelman:

I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional...

I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me.

Over at The American Scene, Ross Douthat is similarly puzzled by the performance of the Best and the Brightest:

If you had asked me, circa 1999, to pick out a group of senior GOPers who I would have wanted at the table in a national-security crisis - well, I'm not sure I could have done better than Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, with (in theory, though of course it didn't turn out that way) Brent Scowcroft whispering in Condi's ear, and George H.W. whispering in his son's. This is how the Bush Administration was sold to people, on foreign affairs at least, and I remember watching television after 9/11 and being so relieved to have Powell around, and Cheney, and Rummy, instead of, say, Anthony Lake or Madeleine Albright.

In the immortal words of "Seinfeld"'s Elaine Bennis: well, that's because you're an idiot.

I am but a shabby poetaster who don't know nothin' about nothin', yet I've had a bad feeling about this thing from the beginning, and continued to express that bad feeling throughout the days when the current former war fans were calling us all traitors.

So what did I catch that these geniuses missed?

I like to think that it was mainly common sense. Rome could subdue, enslave, and Romanize far-flung populations for decades. On the other hand, America's style has mostly been to cut and run and let the United Fruit Company sort things out. A great exception was World War II, which was run by a crew very different from the lot that has presided over the Iraq debacle.

Vanity Fair's neocons grumble that their dream of pacifying the Middle East at the point of a gun was deferred by mere screwups. Yet Cheney, Rumsfeld, et alia are not screwups -- on their own terms, they've been marvelously successful. They have made the GOP a War Party exuding strength, confidence, and animal vitality. This has won a few elections and may win another on Tuesday. Perhaps more importantly, they have managed to siphon from the U.S. Treasury a considerable amount of cash for their buddies, and they are in the process of kicking over their traces so that We the People will not get a chance to take some of it back. When it's all over, Rumsfeld will be able to buy himself five more homes, at least.

So maybe, despite my failings, I have managed to obtain in the course of a long and checkered life some skills that these professors and pundits failed to pick up: I can spot a scumbag at ten paces. I can smell bullshit. I know that the laws of the universe will not necessarily be reversed because I so very badly want them to be. And though I sometimes find that I have left a store counter with short change, I certainly know better than to patronize that establishment again.

Hopefully a few voters out there have acquired the same skills.

NOTHING'S SHOCKING. "Astonish me," Diaghilev told his auditioners. Would he were alive today! We are lately seeing such breathtaking leaps (albeit of logic) as would send him into raptures, and make Nijinksy step back with his hands on his hips and go "Day-um!" or whinny jealously or whatever he did.

As Thatcher once told us there is no such thing as society, David Frum now tells us there is no such thing as hypocrisy. Read his essay on Ted Haggard if you have time to waste and a strong stomach. It floored me; I am still on the floor, typing from there, so forgive any misspellings. Frum's opening made me think he was just going to show sympathy for a fallen sinner; later, I thought he would be content to tag on some contempt for a liberal media pile-on; but eventually I realized to my horror this man, a professional writer who had once been employed by the President of the United States, was rejecting a taboo as old as human society:

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution...

...the first man may well see his family and church life as his "real" life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.

Yet it is the first man who will if exposed be held up to the execration of the media, while the second can become a noted public character - and can even hope to get away with presenting himself as an exemplar of ethics and morality.

How does this make moral sense?

Because, you hoser, human society depends upon at least a rudimentary concept of justice. We can forgive inconsistencies, and even admire trying and failing, but when someone amasses power from us based on his personal superiority, and is proved a fraud, he has broken the basic bargain of leadership. We mock him not out of meanness, but out of a communal survival instinct.

When such a concept is assimilated, Tartuffery of Reverend Haggard's sort* is immediately and viscerally perceived as unjust. And hilarious.

It's not possible that a functional adult could be as ignorant as Frum portrays himself here. I have to believe that he's just desperately trying to defuse a worrisomely familiar culture bomb. For big-time conservatives on the eve of a big election, it may be that the Haggard case makes a sinister bookend to the Foley case: both instances of sexual scandal that are not really germane to any political issue, but which may excite feelings among the rest of the tribe that our leaders, with their Family Values crests and credos, are not everything they claim to be.

In such circumstances, an outrageous moral lecture on behalf of a hypocrite could be worth a try. If you confuse or cow them, they might stop giggling.

*UPDATE. I hadn't noticed this before, but while Frum and many of his fellow travellers have talked about all this as if it were proved that Haggard had sex with Mike Jones, this is not the case, though Jones insists it is. So I don't know that Haggard has been hypocritical, and apologize for even peripherally carrying the imputation forward. I should know better than to follow NRO's lead on anything.