PREVARICATION CONSULTANTS. National Review continues to give lying lessons to St. Rudy. The latest seminar comes from Rich Lowry, and contains several corkers -- this is my favorite:

Giuliani apparently thinks that saying he hates abortion is enough. But pro-lifers will want to know why he hates abortion. Because it’s taken the lives of 48 million unborn babies since Roe? Giuliani’s “hate” line rings so false because, temperamentally, he is not one to hate something without outlawing or attempting to discourage it.

That last bit is lovely and accurate. Mayor Giuliani, fellow citizens will recall, actually cracked down on dancing in bars, availing a disused Prohibition-era law. There is some dispute as to whether he did this as part of a crusade against underage drinking, or just because he's a miserable son of a bitch. But yeah, Giuliani does indeed seem to believe that what he doesn't like should be banned. That's why he would be a disastrous President.

Lowry closes that, if the insufficiently insincere Giuliani would only attend their lying lessons, "[his] position would still be a contrivance, but at least it would be a coherent and shrewd one." That's a winning strategy! Vote Giuliani -- he may be full of shit, but it's our shit!

UPDATE. New spin from Ace O. Spades:

I wonder if Giuliani could have cast his [abortion] flip-flop as simply deferring to the wishes of the city he wanted to manage... wouldn't it have been better for him to have announced he was "functionally pro-life," but had to make strong assurances of defending abortion rights to NYCers in order to get accomplished what needed to be accomplished?

In other words, he nobly lied because otherwise we wouldn't have voted for him, thereby depriving New York of his much-needed leadership.

How unselfish of him! If only I'd thought of this tactic at key moments in my own life: "Honey, if you'd found out that I was cheating on you, you would have broken up with me -- and I just couldn't let you make that mistake!"

SHORTER HUGH HEWITT: The Star-Tribune is making Lileks get up off his ass! Cancel your subscriptions!

I don't get it. They're always bitching about how evil liberal reporters twist the news. Now one of their favorite operatives has a chance to bring fair 'n' balanced coverage to whatever the hell goes on in the Twin Cities, and they're complaining.

Maybe Jimbo can camp out in front of a madrassa and wait for someone to look at him cross-eyed. Hot copy, that!

These guys always want everyone else to work harder; let's see how they like it.

(Also, Hewitt says, "Imagine The New Yorker asking E.B. White to manage the restaurant listings." I say, imagine E.B. White writing endlessly about his trips to the hardware store and the cute things his widdle girl says, and trying to get that past Harold Ross.)

UPDATE. Lots of good commentary but Nancy's is the best.

UPDATE 2. Jimbo's fan club says covering news is demeaning, MSM is for fags, Lileks is being censored, and a bunch of other really stupid shit.

Again, I don't know why Lileks and his fellow he-men aren't tickled to have him transformed into a real live newshound -- such a hardboiled profession, and it goes so well with a fedora! Why would they prefer he remain in his ivory rec-room, spinning out deepthink on Why I Like Pie and such like?

I guess because his new job will require some actual work -- e.g, the lifting of phone receivers -- and contact with people who are not store clerks, on premises that are not Target or Chuck-E-Cheese. As with their pet war, they only like the rough-and-tumble parts of life when there's a nice, thick plexiglass screen between them and the reality.

Someone told me the guy's salary is just a few COLAs from six figures. And I'm supposed to cry bitter tears because he has to get up and walk around? Fuck him.

DOPE, GUNS, AND FLASHING IN THE STREETS. (UPDATE -- GFR has complained, and I have made two corrections. They are marked with an *.)

I thought agreeing to "vlog" with the horrible Ann Althouse was Garance Franke-Ruta's worst possible mistake, but she has topped it by declaring that, rather than expose themselves to the statistically insignificant chance of posterity in a "Girls Gone Wild" video, women between the ages of 18 and 25 21* should be prohibited from allowing their breasts to be photographed (insert) by certain people*(/insert):

It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21--"consent," in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.

Old enough to fuck, not old enough to flash! The slogans just write themselves.

I am sorely tempted to play the jaded roué here, but fun as that might be, I will for the moment take the high road. Franke-Ruta's argument is based on the harm that may be done young women whose bodies may be caught on film in a moment of animal high-spirits:

Once upon a time, a picture was just a picture. Today it can be wirelessly beamed to computers that can email it to networks where, once it is posted, it can be downloaded and endlessly reproduced by anyone who wants it. The detritus of 50 years of television is now available on YouTube, as are highlights from many DVDs. Just as Google transforms us all into archivists of previously fleeting moments, so too does the new digital recording technology give youthful acts a permanent life. In the case of Mr. Francis and his empire of imitators--not to mention angry ex-boyfriends with digital flash cards and a long memory--it can transform the playful exhibitionism of young women into scarlet letters that follow them around for life.

Lord knows our discourse is distorted when it comes to sex. It is my observation that it is distorted because of our misperceptions about sex and the body, not because sex and the body are themselves noxious. Popular R-rated giggle-fests from Porky's to the American Pie movies are, to me, dirtier than a typical porn film, because they posit sex as something you get away with, like theft or vandalism.

The appeal of "Girls Gone Wild" is based on that social malfunction. It's not the sight of 18-year-old tits that's gross -- O, far from it! -- but the idea that the filmmaker and the viewer have stolen the view because the nubile was, in Franke-Ruta's words, "intoxicated by both a Scorpion Bowl (illegally served) and her own newly developed form."

To worry as Franke-Ruta does that "Girls Gone Wild" participants will suffer lasting damage when their videos "follow them around for life" is to acknowledge that this fucked-up American sex-madness is unavoidable and undefeatable. Why else prevent women who are otherwise judged capable of sexual freedom from exhibiting their lady-parts? Elsewhere Franke-Ruta explains that she doesn't complain if young women (and men, she suddenly adds) privately enjoy "photos for personal use." But what is the meaning of the "privacy" concerns she claims to support if she wants private citizens to be legally enjoined from exercising or disposing them?

Exploitation, alas, exists. But this is no reason to fold the tent of liberty. All our rights -- the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right not to incriminate ourselves, etc. -- can be exploited, and indeed are exploited every day, but we try to find (or should try to find) the least restrictive way to limit those abuses, rather than allow those abuses to limit our rights.

So if the brain-damaged idea of sex as explotation is the problem, I say let us militate against that idea, not against the sexual autonomy of legal adults. Let us have wide and unapologetic dissemination of sexual imagery. Let us preempt the Joe Francises of the world by having fully empowered girls (and boys) go wild on their own terms -- there's a vlog subject more linkworthy than Fatso v. Ratso! Let the idiots among us hoot and holler and wank; the tide of history is against them. Isn't it?

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: If one of you gentlemen had hired me, I wouldn't be ratfucking your campaign in my column.

DEFINING JACKASSERY DOWN. "Giuliani is going to get whacked around a lot for his performance tonight... Although honest to God, if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had been given the same question on differences between Shia and Sunni, I'd bet either of them would have/could have fumbled as badly. Really unfair that he got hit with that one." -- Jim Geraghty

Tomorrow Saint Rudy will beat up Al Sharpton or something. The real losers in tonight's Republican Presidential debate: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama! Look up, Hannah, look up!

ARTS POLICY. I've been on a tear lately about rightwing dabblers in the arts-criticism racket, but I feel it behooves me to go into negative space to better define my territory. Here is the beginning of a recent book review in the New York Sun by Otto Penzler:

Let me make something clear. I'm prejudiced: I don't like people who don't like America, and I especially don't like Americans who don't like America. I've never met David Ignatius, but I don't believe I'd like him, though I hope I'm wrong because he sure can write. I just find it impossible to separate the political tone (it's all our fault) from the novel, just as I can no longer be enchanted by Barbra Streisand's voice or Sean Penn's thespian skills.

Now, if you're more open-minded than I am (I won't say liberal, because no one is more closedminded than liberals, thereby ruining a wonderful word and an outstanding concept), just skip this column and go out and get a copy of "Body of Lies" (Norton, 349 pages, $24.95) because it is an exceptionally exciting thriller.

I have no objection to this, nor even to the fairly politicized (but still analytical) body of the review that follows. In fact I admire it. Penzler lays his prejudices on the line right up front, so we know what his terms are. I may be suspicious of his conclusions, but I feel so because I have been warned, not because I smell a rat.

I suspect Penzler's rigor has much to do with his genuine interest in the material. Penzler knows from thrillers, being the proprietor the excellent Mysterious Bookshop, and I sense in his caveat a tinge of embarrassment that his personal preferences interfere, in this case, with his keen appreciation of cracking good yarns.

That isn't a bad way to approach any task of criticism that engages our dual loyalties when we come across a subject we find aesthetically interesting but abhorrent for other reasons. I try to do it myself -- see for example my review of The Passion of the Christ -- and I find it requires a good deal of doubt.

I was going to say "self-doubt," but isn't all doubt self-doubt? The religious think doubt is a demon, because it feels that way -- burning, confusing, easy for the simple to pin on the Father of Lies. I think of it as a safeguard. I think of the late adman Bill Bernbach, who carried in his pocket a piece of paper that said "Maybe he's right," which I imagine served for him a function similar to that of the crown-bearer who whispered in the Roman general's ear "Victory is fleeting": a guard against hubris fatal to his true purpose.

Doubt is not always easy to summon. Life is easier (I imagine, not having had the experience since I was a little boy) when every intellectual decision is binary and predetermined. Doubt makes us work, and allows error. It's usually inconvenient, it can wreck your career, it looks bad on your face, it invites others to doubt you.

But I think doubt is absolutely necessary -- not in politics, so much, as I fear this blog demonstrates regularly, but in matters of art, which I find much more important.

In politics, certainty is a winner. We can't elect candidates or win favor for ideas, on the platform "On balance, I think we might be right." I see its utility. But I fear that if I let such relative externalities as politics sink so deep into my own bedrock that I would let them affect my ability to appreciate the things in life that are really beautiful -- the things that make life worth all the tedious business that goes with it -- that I had to say, no, I reject the appeal of this character, this melody, this gesture, because it conflicts with my political program, then I will have lost my soul. Maybe if the compensation of gaining the world were available -- if I were a Presidential candidate, for example -- I would feel differently. But, for good or ill, I don't have that option.

That's probably why I'm so annoyed by the culture cops. They don't seem to know that there is anything more important than their smelly orthodoxies -- little, as Orwell had it, or big, as in the case of megachurchmen and other such fixers who seek to herd every true desire for transcendence into promixity to their ancient buncombe and collection plates. That's why any encounter with a work of art, however unpropitious its aspect, however contrary it may at first blush seem to the other thoughts I have rattling around in my head, is something to which I want to be available, and which I would rather enjoy than condemn. Wherever else I may be forced to hold the line, let my heart and soul be open.

IF I COULD GET PAST HER BODYGUARDS, I BET SHE'D REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME. Ha! No sooner do I finish dealing with Ross Douthat's complaint that the mean liberals won't write novels about Republicans than Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley complains that the mean liberals won't make anti-Communist movies for him.

(Like Douthat, Billingsley is one of those guys who goes over works of art with an ideological spectrograph, looking for wavelengths of wrongthink. He also thinks the Hollywood blacklist was no big deal because the "free market" took care of it. That's why this piece of shit appears in Reason, I guess.)

I keep saying it and saying it but I never get a satisfactory answer. Why don't you make your own fucking books and movies? Pen and paper are cheap, and I'm sure Murdoch, Scaife, and Sun Myung Moon will be happy to bankroll The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew or Red Dawn II or whatever stupid shit you want to make.

I guess the opening aria, in which Billingsley imagines top Hollywood stars acting out one of his favorite Stalin exposès ("Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder"), really shows us where he's at: he wants celebrities to validate him. He wants those figures on the posters on his bedroom walls to tell him, "Yes, Kenneth, we agree with you, only under capitalism can the soul of man thrive; and you look really cute in those pajamas." Maybe that's what's eating all these morons. Maybe they're all secretly 12 years old. Their prose certainly supports this theory.

UPDATE. The Perfesser hehindeeds. He really surprises me. Weren't blogs and nanobots and home recording studios supposed to make Hollywood obsolete, like they did newspapers and traditional medicine and everything else?

I forgot -- nothing the Perfesser says means anything except what he, at some future date and depending on circumstances, retroactively wishes it to have meant.

UPDATE II. The New York Times hears from a successful screenwriter who was first drawn to cinema as a boy by a love of slasher flicks ("We devoured them and they, in turn, juiced us up"), and derives from this experience that slasher flicks turn people into deranged killers. Is this some sort of coded confession to some as-yet-unsolved serial murders? I hope the FBI is profiling the shit out of him. This could be bigger than Zodiac!

ATTENTION WHORE. Ross Douthat, incomprehensibly installed at the Atlantic Monthly now, bitches that no one's writing great works of literature about the Bush Administration:

If Soviet Communism didn't make "the aesthetic feel insufficient" for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then I don't want to hear a peep from the poor delicate darlings who think they're too traumatized by the Bush years to write anything that's any good...

No, the fact that none of our artists have managed to make something out of this Administration tells us way more about the artists than the Bushies. It suggests that there aren't any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren't interesting, but because our intelligentsia's political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal's fears.

He seems awful mad that none of us wants to write about him and his buddies. But are Douthat's arms broken or something? No? And he's supposed to be some sort of a writer, isn't he? Then why doesn't he write the goddamn Great Republican Novel himself instead of crying because no one else will do it for him?

First possible answer is, by his own admission, Douthat isn't the greatest judge of Republican character. More likely, it's because Douthat is, despite his ornamental pretensions to aestheticism, really just another culture warrior who thinks of art as a commodity to be turned out according to the specs of the Central Planning Committee he hopes to run someday. It's not something he would dirty his own hands with.

BOOK CLUB. Another reason to hate them all, of course, is because they're such pissy little shits. Al Gore says* his favorite book is The Red and the Black, and the National Review guys start going "Oh no he dih-hint" and snapping their gum. Derbyshire at least admits only that he would like to believe Gore is lying about Stendhal (though Clinton, in the Derbview, is presumed to lie about everything, especially the Tomes of the Ancients): John Podhoretz says, with no evidence whatsoever, that Gore was trying to "make it appear he is something he almost certainly isn't: A steady reader of great literature." Not like Podhoretz, who walks around the office in a toga, index finger heavenward, declaiming on lofty artistic subjects between infusions of malted milk.

You can just see them balling their tiny fists and wishing they could make Gore take a test with lots of trick questions.

Literature, like everything else in this life, means nothing to them but an opportunity to score points on the people they have been trained to hate. Were they not trusted advisors to the scum who wreck our lives, I'd pity them.

*UPDATE. Actually Gore made this claim in 2000, and the Cornerites were roused by its recent mention by Rick Brookhiser, who adds:

George W. Bush said his was The Raven, an old Pulitzer prize winning bio of Sam Houston that is readily available in Texas. Most interesting bit: Houston had the same problem Bush had.

I had no idea Sam Houston was a sociopathic coke freak, nor that he believed the Alamo to be a great success right up till such brains as he had were dashed out by Mexicans. History is fun!

RASHOMON WITH RETARDS. It has been some time since we looked in on Gates of Vienna, which is sort of like Little Green Footballs for logorrheic Eurotrash. I could use a laugh, so let us don our Hazmat suits and return.

In recent months the Gateseans have devoted much of their time to spying on local Mohammedeans, even going so far as to do airborne reconnaissance of their home with the giddy enthusiasm of little boys playing Army Mans ("OK, I’ll lay out everything I can about the 'basketball court.' I’ve been studying it for a long time in the full-res versions..." Yes, that's an actual quote.)

Local MSM reporters are less suspicious but, as all GoV readers know, the press is part of an immense conspiracy to turn all free, still-predominantly-white nations over to global jihad. Further evidence of this is offered in a Scandinavian's report called "The End of the American Dream?" Apparently the sort of wingnut who is normally enraged when Europeans talk smack about their native land will not mind this fellow doing it, as he shares his readers' fear of dusky-hued peoples. For several paragraphs he even gets away with noticing Bush's involvement in the mass transportation of Mexicans into realms heretofore known for their whiteness, before losing his nerve and blaming "left-wingers" who "see it as a goal to erase the Western cultural heritage." (The Scandinavian also informs us that Los Angeles is "becoming a Third World city, with little glamour left." Maybe it's time I moved there!)

But my favorite bit is "Making The Modern Case for Monasticism," in which correspondent "Dymphna" reports that her boy, away at school, was nearly entrapped by a "young liberal co-ed" -- not in the badger game of olden times, but in an assault claim. His story sounds less fishy than sad:

“Max” and I had water guns and were using them to squirt people at various points during the party [held at our dorm suite]...

This intoxicated young woman suddenly attacked me, trying to take the gun...

When I wouldn’t let her take it, she grabbed my glasses instead. Afraid she might break them; I grabbed her arm — without hurting her — and took my glasses back. At which point the girl said:

“I could call the police.”

I was mystified. “About what?”

“You attacked me!”

I looked at her, up and down. “There aren’t any marks on you.”

She drew her own fingernails down her skin. “Not yet. There could be.”

Mind you, this is what he told his mom, who blames "feminism," which she says "exists solely to promote abortion rallies and arrange emasculation events." But even given its provenance, the lad's narrative lends itself to still more piquant interpretations than self-defense before the matriarch. There is some poignance already in the fact that, while in the company of "intoxicated" women at college, he chose to shoot water pistols with his pal; might he have misunderstood the female's physical approach, or at least misplayed it? I think of "I looked at her, up and down," and of her arm-raking gesture, and wonder what might have been. Maybe he will, too, when he's older.

For the rest of them, there is clearly no hope.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY. You have to hand it to Newsbusters. Who else would have imagined that the proper objective correlative to the current DC Madam story would be the liberal media's brutal suppression of the 1996 Dick Morris story?

ABC pounded the word "tabloid" in all of their coverage (even though Hume noted no one in the Morris or Clinton camps denied the Star story). But now ABC is the "tabloid" outlet on the Call Girl beat. Ross touted his scoop on Monday's Good Morning America about a State Department official who resigned in disgrace, even putting on a prostitute's lobbyist to denigrate him...

I and everyone I know must have been incredibly plugged-in back in the 90s, because we all knew that Morris was consorting with prostitutes and improving his status with them by letting them eavesdrop on his conversations with Bill Clinton. And all we had to do to obtain this suppressed information was occasionally pick up clandestinely-published samizdat such as the New York Times and Newsweek.

I kid. Newsbuster's angle is not that the MSM spiked the story -- who could claim that? -- but that they took a different tone about it, talking about it as if it were tabloid-sourced, which it was, and surprisingly undetrimental to Clinton's standing in the polls, which it also was.

What is Newsbusters trying to show here? One interpretation might be that Clinton suffered little from the Morris affair because the MSM had his back -- that we all heard the story, including the salacious details, but were hypnotized into ignoring it by Peter Jennings' Jedi mind tricks. Of course, Clinton had long been associated with sexual scandal by that point -- thanks to vigilant reporting of his imbroglios by the press -- and it may be that citizens were simply relieved that it was a Clinton flack, rather than the Big Dog himself, who got caught with the prostitutes. While, in the current case, the first disgraced party is a celebrated promoter of abstinence from America's Party of Moral Uplift, and his exposer claims to be sitting on a fat batch of further revelations.

That agents of the mainstream press may be manipulated by political spin doctors is a proposition accepted by people of all political philosophies. But nothing cuts family ties in that community like a nice, juicy scandal. Whether a newsreader arches his left of his right eyebrow while reporting such tawdry tales, his audience will still be focused on the savory (or unsavory, depending on your point of view) details -- the stained dress, the cigar, Leaves of Grass, and so forth.

It may be that our famously horny former President got away with much more than Randall Tobias ever will because, somewhere along the line, the Democrats were established as the sexed-up Party, while the Republicans were cast as defenders of Values, Guardrails, and Christian Revivalism. I don't think it's unfair to note that, if this assignment of roles involved mind-tricks, they did not originate with Peter Jennings. That a number of Republicans have of late been discovered with their pants down, and that many of us find this appallingly funny, may have less to do with the prejudices of reporters than it has to do with the law of unintended consequences.

SHORTER ACE O. SPADES: (through angry, helpless tears) Why don't you stop picking on someone your own size?

UNQUALIFIED. Eugene Volokh on a columnist who complained about St. Rudy Giuliani's Vote-For-Me-Or-Die-in-a-Terrorist-Attack bullshit:

Now Giuliani's speech may well be unsound; I'm not a Giuliani partisan, and I have no desire to defend it on the merits. But I'm puzzled, as I often am about such arguments, by the claim that "milking one's 9/11 reputation for crass political gain is, obviously, despicable"...

Imagine a surgeon who, in the wake of some disaster, does what many see as a superb job of saving many patients. He then goes to hospital managers and says that the hospital's patients will do better if he (rather than his rivals who he thinks haven't shown such skills) were given a promotion to an even more responsible surgical position.

Would we fault him because "milking [his] reputation [formed during a deadly disaster] for crass [careerist] gain is, obviously, despicable"?

Well, this analogy holds only if the surgeon's record includes the following:

• A spotty performance including some exceptional saves and many incredible bonehead errors, costing the hospital millions of dollars every year.
• Alienated the hell out of nearly the entire hospital staff, patients, benefactors, etc.
• On one exceptionally trying day, found the super-special operating room he'd built (at great expense to the hospital) for such days was completely useless; still, performed his duty as dictated by his office without shitting his pants.
• Tried unsuccessfully to avoid mandatory retirement by strong-arming the doctors who were in line for his position.
• In applying for a more prestigious hospital leadership position, declared that an operating room should be run every day the way his was on that Great Day when it was blown up -- that is, in crisis-triage mode, with lots of fear, panic, and running around. Also let it be known that he no longer believed in any of the shit he pretended to believe back when he was at that other hospital -- except for the part where he was hailed as America's Surgeon.

Also, if I were Volokh I'd be careful about defending Giuliani with the image of an angry, lisping duck.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Back from DC now, with no bad Von Hippel-Lindau-related news at present. Thanks for all the goodwill. I did less sightseeing than usual, mostly strolling and working on my sunburn and taking drinks at the rooftop bar of the Hotel Washington. There I met an heiress of indecipherable middle age whose family, she claimed, had once owned the hotel, but had sold it for ready cash. She drank Irish Coffee, though it was after midnight, and said she no longer bothered with doctors as they had poked and prodded but never done her any good. Well, you can't argue with success.

I did have dinner with Thomas Nephew, who's a prince -- smarter and better educated politically than I by several orders of magnitude, as his weblog daily demonstrates, yet still willing to engage my bilious, jejune prattle. He happily maintains a wife, child, and pets, and also an easy-going sense of humor and perspective, despite his proximity to the thrumming engines of government that comprise much of his subject matter, which would drive me madder than I am -- I wonder how he does it? He matched me beer for beer, so I doubt that he takes sedatives. Remarkable fellow.

Also saw the Jasper Johns show at the National Gallery. The exhibition was full of studies and multiple versions, which added to the impression that any subject, however silly, may be elevated by talent and obsessive hard work. It's just amazing how much energy is still in those paintings, even when they're so thick with scrawls, smears and impastos that the lines of force seem to be cancelling each other out. It's like the subjects -- targets, cans, compasses, legs, and assorted gee-gaws -- so mesmerized him, simple as they were, that they became mysteries that he had to paint his way out of.

OCCAM'S RAZOR TO THE RESCUE. Andrew Klavan at City Journal:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine...

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are...

Man, if I had a dime for every ill-mannered little shit who believed that the cold stares provoked by his bigoted drivel were proof of his incorruptibility and his hearers' intolerance... well, I might have enough money to be one of those little shits myself.

Klavan has overthought the sitiation. If he's not "the sort of person you want to be seen with," it's probably not because he's "the sort of person willing to speak the truth" about Muslims, poor people, etc.; it's probably because he's an asshole.

(Hat tip to Sven)

AND AS HOWARD ROARK RAVISHED DOMINIQUE, HE CRIED, "WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?" Megan McArdle, known at her own blog as "Jane Galt," says:

In the wake of the Virginia tech murders, there has been a lot of editorialising about gun control and mental health interventions. But I haven't found a single editorial addressing one factor we know creates these mass murders: reporting on the mass murders. In the next few weeks and months, even over the next few years, expect to see copycat killings inspired by Cho's actions. The more saturated the media coverage, the more such events we are likely to get. But as far as I know, few papers have taken to advocating that we cut down on news coverage of these events.

Funny, I was just talking about bullshit libertarians, and here we have someone named after a fucking Ayn Rand character who thinks free markets, while good in their place, just don't apply to news.

I don't want to hear any more crap from these people about how I hate freedom because I want to use tax money to give medicine to sick paupers.

SERVICE ADVISORY. I had a discussion with Editor Martin the other day. He's down in Georgia working with the CDC on public health issues. He marveled at the CDC's effectiveness, and especially marveled that the incompetence that emanates from the Bush Administration like stink lines from a cartoon skunk had not damaged the CDC as it has so many other Federal entities. We speculated that perhaps even the Bushies balked at imposing their maladministration upon agencies of public health -- and then we thought of the FDA and Walter Reed Hospital.

Well, who knows. CDC is perhaps both good at its job and good at holding the line. I suspect the same of the National Institutes of Health, which I visit every year as a subject in their Von Hippel-Lindau study. Their facilities are amazing, their staff top-notch, and they accomplish amazing things.

I hope I'm of some help, though my interest is not entirely altruistic. The good news is, if they find tumors in you, they take them out, and they're very good at it. The bad news is, they sometimes find tumors. I've had a few pheochromocytomas out, and for ten years I've been running on only a tiny sliver of adrenal tissue. Pheos tend to recur, so chances are one of these years I'll come back from Bethesda an Addisonian, like JFK. Again it's a good news-bad news situation -- your face gets puffy and you have back problems, but you get to run the country and ball Marilyn Monroe (or, I am assuming, her contemporary equivalent).

Tomorrow I'm off for four fun-filled days in Medical Disneyland, during which time posting will be light.

BRING BACK THE BLACK PANTHERS! Gosh, the Perfesser sure is laying it on thick with the gun posts, isn't he? Columbine in the New River Valley really put the zap on his head.

Clearly the poor man is suffering from Posse-Comitatus-itis, a disorder characterized by itchy trigger fingers. As long as the fit is on him, we will never hear the end of his plaintive cries for universal gun ownership -- by force if necessary.

Fortunately I know the cure:



Bring back the Black Panthers! In the 60s there was no more outspoken group of gun-rights enthusiasts. The Panthers marched in state capitols, bravely brandishing their firearms in defiance of those that would take away their Second Amendment rights.

No swifter cure for Posse-Comitatus-itis has been found! Soon open-carry laws were shutting down all over the place -- including California, where the sight of black folk with firearms worked so effectively on Governor Ronald Reagan's Posse-Comitatus-itis that he signed the Mulford Act.

Displays of armed negritude will work like lightning on the Perfesser's condition, and on the cracker community he serves.

Then we'll only have to think of ways to get him to shut up about everything else.

THIS WAS SOMETIME A PARADOX, BUT NOW THE TIME GIVES IT PROOF. "[Glenn] Reynolds describes himself as a libertarian, specifically a libertarian transhumanist." -- Wikipedia.

"As a libertarian myself, I'd love to see the nation run under small-government principles..." -- Instapundit.

"A LOOK AT WHO'S TAKING AID AND COMFORT from Harry Reid's statements." -- Instapundit (link is to Eugene Volokh, often cited as a libertarian but undeclared as such, who says that Senator Reid is "strengthening the enemy's morale as well as by weaking our own soldiers'" by saying that the Iraq War is lost).

Here Perfesser Reynolds denounces NBC for encouraging "copycat mass shootings" by running its freely-obtained Cho footage.

Here is Jane Galt/Megan McArdle, another libertarian, explaining why the overthrow of Roe v. Wade would be a good thing, using an internationalist argument ("The restrictions that could actually be passed at the Federal level would probably bring our abortion law roughly in line with the rest of the world's").

We could go on and on with this, but why bother? With all props to those brave souls who cleave, come what may, to a coherent libertarian line, in the broad swath of public discourse "libertarian" is not a philosophical affiliation at all, but a grace note one adds to one's conservatism as a distinguishing feature (or, we might say, marketing ploy) to gain a wider audience, mostly consisting of people who are vaguely ashamed of current American conservatism.

This is why, despite my predilections, I try not to refer to myself as "libertarian-leaning" -- not out of contempt, but out of respect. Words should have meanings as specific as reason can make them, or all hope of using reason to dig out of the mess we're in is lost.

UPDATE. I made two little changes: in the penultimate graf, I changed "philosophy" to "philisophical affiliation," and I removed "the word" from "the word 'libertarian.'" Because how can a word be a philosophy? I mean really! My only excuse is that I post these things shit-ass drunk, just to test my skillz.

SHORTER DAVID KAHANE. For the Virginia Tech massacre, I blame the liberal moral relativist Alfred Hitchcock.